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- 60 pc of Heathrow flights "stuck" in holding patterns
News Desk
The Coalition Government is being put under renewed pressure today to look again at its rigid stance of opposing expansion to Heathrow airport, and supporting high-speed rail links with news that delays at Heathrow airport are costing airlines hundred of thousands of pounds in fuel and discharging tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Business leaders today have called on the Government to "wise-up" to the possibility that companies from the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will take their business to other European cities and bypass London, if continued delays to flights are not addressed.
Figures from the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), state that airline jets circling to land at Heathrow for a cumulative 55 hours a day, will burn 190 tonnes of fuel at a cost of £119,000 and will discharge 600 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Airlines are now actively looking at other alternative European bases with Easyjet building up new bases in Paris, Madrid and Milan and British Midland (BMI) has plans to grow through Frankfurt, Zurich, Brussels and Vienna. British Airways boss Willie Walsh has all but given up hope on any expansion at Heathrow and said that "overcrowding in London had already forced airlines to look elsewhere".
Plans by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson for an airport on the Thames estuary branded "Boris island airport" have been scorned by Virgin Atlantic who earlier this year questioned the viability of the "Boris-island" airport with Steve Ridgway the airlines chief executive claiming in the Financial Times that "its just not do-able or deliverable it’s the wrong side of where the locus of the economy is".
The Times in a report today said that Arab sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure funds said that "they had not heard of the mayor's plan and would have little interest in funding it". The estimated costs of the "Boris island airport" have been put at anywhere up to £70 billion.
The Government's Aviation Minister Theresa Villiers said in The Times:
"It is untrue that to suggest that Government does not have a strategy to help UK aviation grow and prosper. Indeed we are seeking the views from the industry on a new policy framework for the sector which supports economic growth while addressing the environmental impact of flying".
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