Britain’s eight biggest airports plan to fly almost 150 million passengers a year, the equivalent of 300,000 extra jumbo jets, in a bet that climate targets will not hold back the industry.
A Financial Times analysis of the expansion project found that combined it will be able to handle 387 million passengers a year, an increase of more than 60 percent from the 240 million people who used the airport in 2019.
The figures highlight how the airport is planning for a period of breakneck growth despite significant financial losses during the pandemic. He also showed how the industry believes transformational growth is still possible within the 2050 deadline for the UK to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
More than a third of the growth will come from London Heathrow’s proposed megaproject to build a third runway. This will increase passenger capacity at Britain’s biggest airport to 142 million a year compared to the 81 million it handled in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic. The airport paused plans in 2020 as Covid-19 shut down the global aviation sector but last month signaled it would resume.
Chief executive John Holland Kaye told the FT in February that he was working “with a view to restarting the planning process. . . We will show what our plans are later this year. Any decision to proceed with the application would be subject to an internal review, which has not yet been completed.”
Other projects are more modest in size, and some of Gatwick’s proposal to fly 30 million more passengers a year by bringing the emergency runway to regular use, to the planned expansion of Manchester one of the terminals to handle an additional 15 million passengers. Edinburgh is completing work to increase capacity to 20 million passengers by 2019.
Airport executives and investors said the airport was looking to push through growth plans because many in the industry believe it will only become more difficult in the future when environmental pressure grows.
Aviation, which is seen as a key driver of economic growth, accounts for 8 percent of UK emissions and is difficult to decarbonise because of the challenge of finding viable green propulsion technology.
The UK’s latest policy framework for airport expansion was published in 2018, and supports new runways at Heathrow and other airports “making the best use” of existing infrastructure.
Industry executives argue that there is no reason to block expansion as the industry has pledged to reach net zero by 2050. They also point to rapid progress on quieter aircraft to help ease local concerns about noise pollution.
This was supported by a Department for Transport paper on decarbonised aviation published last year which said airport expansion could be done within the government’s climate change commitments as new technologies, such as cleaner fuels, would help the aviation industry achieve net zero by 2050.
But the Committee on Climate Change, the government’s independent climate adviser, has warned that if annual passenger numbers increase by more than 25 percent from 2018 levels by 2050, emissions savings will have to come from other sectors to meet the set carbon targets.
Environmental groups question whether there is growth in flying compatible with cutting carbon emissions, pointing to significant technological and financial obstacles in the way of decarbonizing the industry.
They argue that the government needs a new overarching strategy to monitor the overall level of airport expansion, and benchmark the aggregate picture against climate commitments.
Alex Chapman, senior researcher at the New Economics Foundation, an anti-expansion think-tank, said current government policy was “effectively sanctioning unlimited growth in the sector”.
The airport’s 2018 policy framework, which guides planning decisions, states that increases in greenhouse gas emissions caused by any expansion project must not have a “material impact on the government’s ability to meet carbon reduction targets”.
But Alistair Watson, partner and head of planning and environment at law firm Taylor Wessing, said the planning system “failed” because of the lack of national oversight, which means that each airport application is considered in isolation and assessed on local impact. “This planning system. . . it wasn’t built for the debates we’re having now,” he said.
Chapman called on ministers to “take responsibility and implement achievable targets”.
The government said the UK has “one of the most ambitious strategies in the world to reduce aviation emissions without affecting this vital sector, and we support the expansion of airports that deliver on our environmental obligations”.
Bernard Lavelle, a consultant and former senior executive at London City and Southend airports, said the airports were “very serious” about reducing emissions.
He said continued growth was essential for the sector, which has very high fixed costs, ranging from security to air traffic control. “You have a lot of out-of-pocket costs literally just to open the front door, though [as passenger numbers rise] the airport can then become quite profitable because costs do not increase at the same rate,” he said.
Some small airports have managed to push through expansion plans recently, including Bristol which won permission to increase the cap on passengers from 10mn to 12mn last year.
But not all have been successful, with the smaller Leeds Bradford airport scrapping plans for a new terminal in 2022 after the government intervened and rejected a local council’s decision to approve the application, citing concerns about the effect on the greenbelt and the wider impact on climate change. .
This issue is likely to move up the political agenda again later this year if, as expected, Heathrow submits plans for a third runway. Holland-Kaye argued that the pandemic had strengthened the case for increasing the size of Britain’s main hub airports, after border restrictions cut off British passengers from other European hubs, such as Paris and Frankfurt.
“Everything we say about the right way has been validated,” he said.
Additional reporting by Camilla Hodgson