Investment in Airports – Transit or Destination?

The key to understanding Britain’s immediate aviation needs is to differentiate between destination airports and international hubs.  London and the South East Region are oversupplied with destination airports.  There is substantial spare capacity in the system to cater for any significant growth in tourists wishing to visit the capital.  However, the South East can never compete as an international transit hub because of travel restrictions and any attempt to bolt a hub operation onto a destination airport will be doomed to fail.

In the eighteenth century the canal builders had no difficulty in differentiating between hubs and destinations.  Neither did the railway engineers of the nineteenth; Crewe is a hub, Euston is a destination.  However, in the twentieth century, for then valid economic reasons, the airport authorities merged the two leaving us with the confusion we face to-day.

Basically to succeed hubs need to offer secure, low cost, rapid, efficient transfers. By avoiding the high costs of land and labour; by freeing operators from existing restrictive airline agreements and by minimising environmental impact – sites outside the South East have considerable advantages.  This situation provides an opportunity for communities to bid for the significant investment that will be required to create a competitive UK transit hub and for the long term, local economic benefits that will result.

There is also a different operational emphasis in hubs and destinations; at the simplest level hubs carry cargo (part of which may well be passengers in transit) whilst destinations specialise in servicing passengers and supporting local tourism.  Both operations are important and volumes for both will depend heavily on future technological, social and economic developments.

The cost of ignoring the development of hubs such as Dubai, Singapore or even Frankfurt is high but so is a policy of investing in inefficient and outdated facilities in the SE (Sow’s Ear). The present economic situation would appear to offer an ideal opportunity for planned infrastructure investment to put the UK at the centre of global air traffic.