I heard recently about suggestions to either extend Heathrow airport into a super-airport, or build a new one near Dartford. I think it's a silly idea. The commitee are essentially suggesting what the person who invented Heathrow thought he first suggested. An airport that would defeat the need to build another aiport. But guess what, we're considering it already.
The airports would not be in the state they are in, if their buildings were invested in more consistently. Certainly no sudden, massive solutions would be necessary. The problem is that super-airports always need upgrading for the things that no-one saw coming. And when a super airport needs upgrading, it's super complex and super expensive. In addition to that, they have to have excellent (and I mean excellent) road and rail links to support them.
A super airport means that everyone in the country has to go there to travel (be it via plane, car or train) and that means the airport must handle an enormous capacity during peak seasons or business hours. Having been trapped in it many times, I can tell you that the current 12 lanes of M25 is nothing like sufficient for Heathrow already. Now, add all the London airport traffic up and try to get it over the bridge/under the tunnel and through the tolls at Dartford - it'll never happen. Plus, the Thames provides a natural boundary to infrastructure projects (didn't they collapse some poor fellow's house extending the H1 link, avoiding the Thames?).
I think a number of hubs is a more appropriate solution, each requiring good but not exellent links between them. We have that already. It means that the traffic is distributed, the security is inherently tighter (you have to break it for each destination, and not once for everyhere), safer due to the fewer people trying to escape in emergencies, more people have jobs and if a problem brings down an airport it only affects a limited number of people.
For the UK, two to three larger hubs might be needed, for A380 and long haul traffic, but good links between them and a few local supporting airports would provide much more balance. It would mean light upgrading, if anything, of the transport network so that everyone benefited from it (not just people in Dartford and those happening to catch flights). It would also encourage the distribution of business and therefore jobs and wealth. The organisation would need to be done carefully and efficiently, but that is also very true of a super airport.
In short, it would provide a more consistent and fair delivery of wealth and infrastructure to the nation, and would also provide better balancing and redundancy of the airport services themselves.
This principle has been proven a number of times before, easily demonstrated by the new obsession of "cloud computing", once called server farms (which have demolished the concept of mainframes, if we're going to keep the analogy alive), as well as numerous other areas including biology, where the majority of large organisms consist of lots of cells, each doing it's own job, rather than just one big one. Indeed, the 'organic' growth of the country has led to a multitude of small towns rather than just one City.
Bigger just isn't better when it comes to satisfying logistical needs - small and plentiful wins the day.
Comments (2)
khan:
Oct 04, 2010 at 06:26 AM
yup, this is true, however your 'proof by analogy' argument is specious to put it lightly. for example have you considered that a super airport would consist of many terminals, transport hubs, individuals, scanning machines shops, aeroplanes etc. thus being equally analogous to the example of an organism consisting of different specialised cells.
Elliot:
Oct 12, 2011 at 07:33 AM
Airports generally consist of a few terminals, and a closure at one generally leads to heavy disruption to them all. A bomb scare in any airport terminal generally closes the airport in all but a few cases. Numerous hubs would avoid this problem.
The 'body' may have been a bad generalisation, but 'the liver' isn't. It doesn't have a few specialised cells, it consists of millions. Cut a piece out of it and it continues to function. Airports are not at that scale, the scale I'm considering, they consist of maybe four elements. Cut one away at the impact on the remaining is huge. Four one-terminal airports, on the other hand, would be far more resilient to disruption on the macro scale.
Besides, airports are not a specialised organism. They are a generic transport hub, aside from a few specialist requirements (e.g. landing strip). But the fundamentals of it are shared with ferry ports, train termini, even large auditoriums, (ticketing, human traffic, evacuation routes). It's like suggesting that businesses should have one, central, highly efficient toilet that consume queues of people, instead of several on each floor.