Heathrow Plans Slammed by Locals and Airlines

The British Government’s plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport have come under attack from a surprising source. Doubts have been expressed by Tim Jeans who is Managing Director of Monarch Airlines.
Mr Jeans says the expansion would have a ‘detrimental impact’ on the lives of millions of Londoners but, more seriously, ‘prevent the aviation industry from being taken seriously over environmental issues’. He also felt that the Government’s suggestion that new technology would lead to reduced emissions was overly optimistic.
The extension will cost £9 billion and has been given permission despite intense environmental objections. An entire village, Sipson, will be flattened, ending a thousand years of occupation and destroying over 700 homes. Three pubs and two schools will be buried under the tarmac of the new runway. Greenpeace UK has said it will make the village “the battlefield of our generation”.

Villagers are divided between resignation and fury. The land is rich and fertile, it was used farmland until World War Two, and the crops grown on it were sold in London’s Covent Garden when that was still a thriving vegetable market. In 1946, under the complex constraints of post-war regeneration, Heathrow was opened as a commercial airport and ever since then, more and more land has been buried under concrete for the airport, for the warehouses and storage yards that support it, for hotels, and inevitably – for parking the cars of those who fly from it.

Terminal 6 will be built on top of Heathrow Primary School, which has existed for more than 130 years and has doubled its student numbers in the past two decades. In an ironic twist, the school’s football team is sponsored by British Airways. Oddly enough, Sipson residents are not that down-hearted. They’ve been threatened with Runway 3 before, in 1952, but that time the government ran out of money – and with the current recession, many of them are hoping that history will repeat itself.

Sipson photograph courtesy of psd at flickr under a Creative Commons licence

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