Andy Stuart writes:
“Your standfirst on the front page for the Lydd Airport story (Last week’s Nuclear jet risk ‘soars‘ story – has been worrying me as it starts by highlighting the risk of “Over 100 large jets an hour could be taking off and landing”!
My immediate thought was fear and then, on reflection, that has to be utter tosh. Quick research shows that in 2014 Heathrow had 1,290 plane movements (take offs and landings) per day on average. This would be dwarfed by Lydd with 1,600 movements, assuming a 16 hour day of operations!
However, having clicked through and ‘read more’ of the story I find that the airport has permission for just over 100 (c110) movements per day!
That’s bad enough, but it’s not the proposed new first London airport you flag up on the front/home page! I can see lots the farmers on the Marsh rubbing their hands and dreaming of the huge off-site car parking operations they are going to set up to service what would be possibly the biggest single runway international airport in the world on the basis of the published 100+ take-offs and landings per hour!”
Charles Harkness replies:
Well spotted. As the main story carefully stated Lydd now has permission for 40,000 flights a year, according to LAAG (Lydd Airport Action Group), which works out at around 110 flights per day. So, as you quite rightly pointed out, our standfirst saying 100 flights per hour is an error which has slipped through the system, and the hourly figure would be four to five flights. My apologies.
However your further comments are cause for thought as even if only medium size jets were in use (100 seats plus) and the airport was in use only during office hours that could mean up to 4,000 passengers arriving at or leaving Lydd daily, by one means or another, or 20,000 a week if it was a five day operation.
Annually that works out at over a million passengers a year and in the 1950s Lydd was reported to be carrying only around 250,000 passengers each year. However 60 years later aircraft have got much bigger and many more people fly. . . and the figures become breathtaking.
London’s Heathrow handled 73.5 million passengers in 2014 and even a comparatively small local airport like Southampton had nearly 1.7 million passengers in 2012. So there are very big numbers around, even in some of the smaller airports – but not all ! And, if much of that traffic were holidaymakers rather than business people, even if only one in three had a car, and there were two per car, that could mean at very least between 3-4,000 cars a week to be parked.
At present though Lydd is not well served by public transport, though its presence as a growing airport may become another argument for electrifying and improving the railway line so that fast, direct Javelin trains into and out of London’s St Pancras station to the area west of Ashford become a possibility. Indeed there is even a branch line to the Dungeness power station passing very close to the airport!
My experience as a travel writer and business passenger/tourist using a number of the smaller airports in the North East, South West, Northern Ireland and even London Docklands suggests figures at Lydd might not reach these levels, but Lydd’s history in the last century as “London’s airport” makes me wonder, particularly if traffic links were improved.
My first “package holiday” was in the 60s from the North East to Majorca and cost £45 for a long weekend in Magaluf, but that airport, a former RAF station now called Durham Tees Valley, has not thrived with passenger numbers of nearly a million in 2006 nosediving to 161,000 following the financial crisis caused by the big banks making unwise loans to borrowers who could not repay and had no assets either.
On the other hand my most recent trip to a tiny island in the Canaries cost ten times as much, was from Gatwick (a single runway airport handling nearly 40 million passengers a year) and an airport ringed by car parks and hotels with all night bus services to both. So some airports are booming, but Lydd’s future depends as much on transport links as it does on a longer runway.
In the 1950s Lydd was handling a quarter of a million passengers annually and at one time a package holiday company ran up to 14 flights a day, and the surrounding fields were being used as car parks. And, once the runway is extended, it should be able to handle fully loaded Boeing 737s (some versions of which carry up to 215 passengers) and Airbus A319s (carrying up to 156 passengers). So it could grow. However perhaps we should also note that in the past there have been two plane crashes at the airport, in January 1958 and August 1978.
Passenger numbers, and their cars, as Andy suggests, may though be the greater risk (statistically) to the surrounding area than Lydd Airport Action Group’s concerns about a plane plummeting into Dungeness power station.