Andy Slaughter MP at HACAN AGM 2025

We attended the HACAN AGM at the Irish Cultural Centre last week where our MP Andy Slaughter was guest speaker. Those attending our 2023 AGM will also recall mention of the third runway in his speech, but only in passing. It has of course never left Heathrow’s agenda, though it must have come as a surprise that this government, with its green ambitions, would put Heathrow expansion on its to-do list quite so quickly. 

Andy was bold enough to suggest that Heathrow expansion may have been swept up as part of an overall positive economic growth agenda, and might be as easily dropped should it fail the government’s tests for noise, air quality, carbon and economics. That’s the straightforward narrative, but not the whole story. There may be rather more to it, as HACAN clearly outlined.

There was much incredulity in the audience as to how the various tests might be, or have now been met, with or without the magic ingredient of 2030’s proposed 10% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) rising to 20% in 2040, and indeed Andy suggested that the proof will lie in the proposals that Heathrow bring forward later this year.  It’s no secret that he has long been an objector. together with many civic and other societies blighted under the flight path, and potential paths, such as ourselves.  As we’ve reported, the chair of parliament’s Transport Committee is now Ruth Cadbury MP, another noted local opponent. Her committee is examining this proposal.

Airspace and Noise

In Hammersmith, the aircraft seem to start earlier each year despite the notional 6am marker for the end of night time restrictions, by which you used to be able to set your clock.  It’s instructive to remember that the Cranford Agreement was always a “gentleman’s agreement”, and that Heathrow regularly modifies the alternation patterns and timings, largely it seems, to suit itself.  A recent discussion at the London Forum revealed that aircraft noise is as much an issue in North as well as Southeast London, where the regular arrivals flight path circles around to align with the river, starting over Tower Bridge. It’s not just a West London issue.

Paul Beckford HACAN AGM 2025

One of the important things mentioned by Paul Beckford of HACAN, was that the third runway may be a stalking horse for expansion of airspace and runway use in other ways.  Newer GPS technology allows simultaneous take-offs and landings and more intensive uses of the existing airspace and runways, and you may recall a related consultation on airspace modernisation held in January 2019. We reported on expansion plans several times that year, the nail in that coffin was of course the 2020 pandemic.

Heathrow operations 2025

The fear is that should the bid for a third runway fail for any reason – which seems reasonably likely – a sop to Heathrow would be for the CAA to enable greater use of these technologies to substantially increase the current cap of 480,000 aircraft movements a year, perhaps by as much as 50%, and possibly worse, phase out the night time ‘ban’ completely, in the name of economic progress.  Heathrow already use Tactically Enhanced Arrivals Mode (TEAM) in some circumstances, typically to land more planes in the morning rush, using both runways with noticeable noise increases locally, and giving us a taster of one version of the future. With possible further liberalisation of airspace still on the agenda, these traffic increases seem perhaps one of the more likely outcomes.