Responsible growth - Heathrow consultation

At British Airways, Heathrow is our main base and so it's key to our success as a business.

At the moment, Heathrow has just two runways – the same number it had when it opened in 1946 – and there's no spare capacity for any more aircraft to take off or land. In order for us to keep growing into the future, it's very important that more capacity is created.

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Of course, like any other company, we're always looking for opportunities to grow and to be more profitable, as long as these opportunities are sustainable. However, the opening of a third runway at Heathrow has much wider implications than just allowing British Airways to expand and we're not alone in supporting a third runway at Heathrow.

The government believes that the UK must have a strong, central airport which can support a large global network of flights if the UK as a whole is to prosper in our increasingly global economy. Heathrow is best placed to provide that strong, central hub.

Amongst the 90 airlines that operate out of Heathrow, British Airways has a very important part to play in making Heathrow the best central hub it can be. As Heathrow's flagship airline, we have plans to introduce an even wider range of services than are currently available once the new runway is in place.

At present, most of the major European airports actually have a larger number of runways than Heathrow. Brussels, Rome and Frankfurt have three runways each (with a fourth currently being built at Frankfurt), Paris Charles de Gaulle and Madrid have four and Amsterdam has five. Munich has also been given permission to build a third.

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'Mixed mode operation' is a method of managing the traffic taking off from, and landing at, airports. When an airport uses 'mixed mode', it means that aircraft are able to take off and land using the same runway. This is the usual method at airports where there's only one runway such as Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, and it's also used at many multiple runway airports around the world.

At the moment, Heathrow doesn't use the mixed mode method. Instead, it uses a method known as 'segregated'. This means that there's one runway for aircraft landing, and one runway for aircraft taking off. Using the segregated method can limit the amount of traffic passing through the airport. There may be times, for example, when the 'arriving' runway is very busy, with aircraft queuing in the sky to land. At the same time, the 'taking-off' runway may be very quiet with this space being wasted.

Introducing the mixed mode method at Heathrow would mean co-ordinating aircraft so that take-off and landing could take place on both runways, making the most of the space available. This would obviously be more efficient and mean that more traffic could pass through Heathrow.

Delays on flights leaving Heathrow increased by 27% from 2002-2006. Introducing mixed mode operation would create enough spare runway space to cut delays. For example, it would reduce the number of aircraft queuing in the air before they're able to land.

Delays could be reduced from as much as 25 minutes to as little as 10 minutes. A short third runway would cut delays even further.

As well as making flight times more reliable, the additional space created at Heathrow would mean that up to 75 new worldwide destinations could be added to the airport's network. The number of flights scheduled per day would also be increased.

Many of the transfer passengers who pass through Heathrow are actually UK citizens connecting from Scotland or the North of England, stopping off on their way to final destinations around the world.

And those transfer passengers who are not UK citizens do, in fact, bring a lot of benefits to the UK. Their spending at the airport and during over-night stays helps to boost the UK economy, and they also help us keep flying to destinations which wouldn't be viable if we were only reliant on passengers beginning their journeys at Heathrow.

More transfer traffic means more destinations available for UK-based travellers than would otherwise be the case. This is of huge benefit to UK business and means more choice for UK citizens which it comes to choosing where to go on holiday.

The Government has laid down guidelines for the amount of noise which will be acceptable from a third runway at Heathrow: the expansion is only allowed to go ahead if the noise created by the new, three-runway airport is the same as, or less than, the noise created by Heathrow as a two-runway airport in 2002.

This may sound like an impossible task, but we are continually reducing the amount of noise generated by our aircraft. This is made easier for us because modern aircraft are generally much quieter than they were in the past. In 1974, 2m people experienced noise levels of 57 decibels or more around Heathrow. Today, this number has been reduced to 300,000 people.

Since 1998, British Airways have halved the noise impact of our aircraft at Heathrow and Gatwick through buying quieter aircraft and by changing the way we run them. We have recently placed a multi billion pound order for 12 Airbus A380s and 24 Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Both of these new aircraft have been rated under the Heathrow noise classification system as producing a quarter of the noise made by a Boeing 747-400, the we currently use on most of our longhaul routes.

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More about our new aircraft

'Runway alternation' is where the use of two runways in segregated mode (one for landing and the other for take-off) is switched over half-way through the day.

This normally means that people living in a particular area will experience a lot of over-head noise during one half of the day and much less during the other half

The introduction of mixed mode would mean both runways being used for landing and take-off throughout the day. This would mean that people living near Heathrow would experience noise for a longer period of time, but at a lower level. Overall, this would be less disruptive for people living near the airport.

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The third runway at Heathrow won't go ahead unless NO2, or nitrogen dioxide, levels are in line with a new EU limit coming into effect in 2010.

n fact, the majority of NO2 in residential areas around Heathrow is caused by road traffic and by urbanisation. On the outskirts of Heathrow, only a third of emissions are caused by aviation and within a mile of the airport boundary, the impact of flying on emissions falls to less than 10%.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge that we do have an impact and are taking steps to address this. To help reduce NO2 emissions, we've introduced the practice of aircraft only using one engine when travelling on the ground. When we move to Terminal 5, we'll also be putting in place stricter limits on the external power supplies our aircraft are allowed to use.

The new longhaul aircraft we've recently ordered will produce between 10 and 46% less NO2 than the aircraft they're replacing. In addition, adopting mixed mode will reduce NO2 emissions in the areas of our airfield where there's currently most room for improvement in air quality.

Learn more about local air quality

At the moment, Heathrow employs 72,000 people directly and a further 100,000 in supporting roles. In the areas around Heathrow, the airport employs as many as 1 in 10 working people.

Naturally, expansion would mean potential for many more jobs and would also secure existing jobs. Across the UK economy as a whole, mixed mode would bring an additional £2.5 billion a year and a third runway would bring an extra £7.5 billion.

Learn more about responsible growth

For some people, travelling by rail is a quick and easy way of moving between cities. For others, travelling by aircraft may be more convenient.

One reason may be that rail journeys often take a lot longer than a flight to the same destination; business people who frequently travel and return on the same day are often reliant on flying because of its relative speed. People may travel by aircraft because they live nearer to an airport than the relevant railway station, or they might be travelling to a final destination which is nearer to an airport. Transfer passengers completing a short hop into Heathrow from places like Brussels or Manchester before connecting to another destination often find it much easier to fly the first leg of the journey; up to half of customers on our shortest flights into Heathrow then transfer onto connecting longhaul flights. At British Airways, we believe it's important that we to keep offering our customers choice in the way they travel for all of these reasons.

Furthermore, when it comes to environmental impact, travelling by rail is not necessarily cleaner than flying. Studies of the effects each method of transport has on the environment vary hugely depending on the assumptions they make about how full aircraft or trains might be on each journey, how electricity is sourced to run trains, and how much CO2 is generated by building and maintaining high speed railways.

Aircraft generally carry more passengers per journey (by percentage) than trains. On average, airlines fly aircraft which are 75% full. This is more than double the figure for long-distance trains in the UK.

New trains also demand more power and produce more CO2 that older trains: whilst aircraft have been reducing weight and the amount of fuel they use in recent years, trains have been getting heavier and hungrier.

A study by Lancaster University in 2004 compared all forms of transport and came to the conclusion that: "car and aircraft fuel efficiency, on a per seat basis, has improved over the last couple of decades while trains have got worse due to factors such as higher speeds, heavier bodies, greater crash protection and larger toilets".