London mayor advocates new airport in Thames

London Mayor Boris Johnson on Monday advocated a new airport for London in the Thames estuary to relieve air congestion and attract new routes and pointed to Hong Kong as an example of a similar successful infrastructure project. Mayor Johnson told an audience of business leaders at the Confederation of British Industry's (CBI) annual conference in central London that on a trip to China last month, he had a dream of a new airport built in the Thames estuary. Johnson said, "I dream I flew into a new runway hub airport, built to the highest environmental standards, an airport cunningly located by the sea, bringing fantastic growth to the economy." The mayor said he then woke "to find it was all true, except that I was in Hong Kong," where a new airport had been built in the early 1990s on land reclaimed from the sea. There is currently a public debate in Britain about the need to increase airport capacity in the nation's capital London, which already has four airports. Heathrow, the largest among the four, is already running close to capacity and expansion is fiercely opposed by many Londoners on environmental grounds. However, business and government are keen for new airport capacity to protect and extend London's status as a global city with direct links across the world. Central to this aim are further direct links to China, which has been identified by British business and government as a market which is key to Britain's economic prosperity in the coming decades. Johnson said there was spare capacity at London's Gatwick and Stansted airports, but he said "what was needed was hub capacity," which would exploit local traffic and international traffic to generate a large range of direct air links. He said London now had direct air links to four Chinese cities, but a further nine cities were served by other hub airports in Europe, such as Frankfurt in Germany. Johnson urged a new airport to create a new hub, pointing to Frankfurt as a competitor because it "had twice as many seats, on twice as many flights, to twice as many cities as London does." He added, "Our tragedy is that our hub airport (Heathrow) is in the wrong place... (and is) by far the biggest inflicter of noise pollution in the whole of Europe." Johnson said plans for a third runway at Heathrow to relieve congestion were "toxic" and were "not going to happen" and that the government should rule it out and cap flights at their current level. The British government set up the Airports Commission to examine options for increased air capacity in Britain, and it is set to make a report on the short term before Christmas and on longer term solutions within two years. Johnson called on the Commission to rule out expansion at Heathrow "so we can get on with building the real solution... to locate the hub elsewhere, to move Heathrow."