BUSINESS NEWS Airlines 2025: Aviation leaders discuss UK airspace, queues and more. By Ian Taylor, London
Modernisation of airspace ‘key to airport expansion’
Airspace modernisation will be crucial to UK airport expansion, especially in London and the southeast with Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton and London City all due to expand in the next 10 years. Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe
said: “You can’t [have] new runways without modernising airspace.” However, he warned: “As
flight paths change, new people will be affected [by noise] and that is controversial. Aircraft are considerably quieter than they were, but that doesn’t matter to someone who moved into a house not expecting any aircraft noise. It’s going to be contentious.”
Air traffic control CAA chief executive Rob
Bishton said: “We’re trying to work through the challenges of airspace modernisation, [with] 2035 a reasonable timeframe for working through the flight paths for a third runway at Heathrow.” Tui Airline chief executive
Marco Ciomperlik hailed the UK’s progress on airspace modernisation, saying: “In the EU, airspace modernisation is a non-event.” He added: “When I look at the
UK’s expansion plans, this would be almost impossible in the EU.”
UK Border Force hails ‘good story’ of lack of queues at immigration
UK Border Force has “a good story to tell” on cutting queues at immigration, according to director general Phil Douglas, who hailed “a turning point” in border management in October. He contrasted the
introduction of the EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) and what he called its “clunky process” with a trial of contactless border technology at Manchester Airport. Douglas said: “The airport queues
on the front pages of newspapers 10 years ago are largely gone.” He promised a further
transformation “in the next two years”, saying: “We’re going to
enforce ETAs [electronic travel authorisations] from next February. People will go through the e-gates and we’ll target people only where we feel there is a risk.” Douglas reported
“the best summer in years” and insisted: “We’ve not had
reports of queues. We’re not interested
in making people queue.
We have a good story to tell.” He added: “I would envisage in 10 or 20 years we’ll have pre- clearance systems so finely tuned that we’re making decisions on who gets into the country when passengers are boarding the plane.”
UK aviation ‘stretched to its limits’ Ian Taylor
UK aviation needs to operate “almost perfectly” every day, with capacity stretched and the system at its limits, according to the head of Nats. But that did not stop Virgin
Atlantic chief customer and operating officer Corneel Koster hailing both the air traffic management system and Heathrow for a “fantastic summer” this year. Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe
insisted “our resilience is pretty high” when he addressed the Airlines 2025 conference in London last week, arguing: “Canada has the same amount of aviation [as Britain] with 10 times more space. The challenge is that the capacity we have is stretched. It has to run almost perfectly every day.” Koster told the conference: “Our industry’s resilience has been tested
travelweekly.co.uk
this year. The system is so congested. It’s not resilient.” However, he hailed “great
work” by Heathrow and Nats, saying: “Heathrow ran a fantastic summer this year [and] we had great cooperation with Nats.” The performance in the UK
was in sharp contrast to that across continental Europe. Warren Brody, chief executive of airport ground handler Swissport, said: “We plan for delays in Europe. We assume in advance there will be delays.” British Airways chief executive Sean
Doyle reported “the best punctuality we’ve ever had at Heathrow this year”. He attributed the improvement to BA making “a lot of changes to how we operate at Heathrow”. Tui Airline chief executive Marco
Ciomperlik highlighted a challenge specific to the UK when flights are disrupted, pointing out: “People in
Heathrow
France, Germany and the Benelux countries are used to going to the airport even two or three hours by rail. [But] people in the UK love to fly from their home airport. That is operationally quite challenging. If there is a problem, it’s tricky to recover.” CAA chief executive Rob Bishton
highlighted major threats posed by drones and cyberattacks and warned: “It would be unrealistic to say they are not going to cause disruption.
What is important is that we limit the impact when something happens.” Questioned about the power
failure which shut Heathrow for 24 hours in March, Heathrow chief executive Thomas Woldbye admitted it was “embarrassing” that he had slept through the first night of the shutdown but insisted: “What is important is that all the right decisions were taken. An airport like Heathrow should not depend on one person.”
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Shutterstock/van Blerk, Max Acronym, 1000 Words
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