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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 1147.PDF
'LIGHT, 16 August 1957 CIVIL AVIATION :OMMENTS ON THE MILLBOURN REPORT By J. M. RAMSDEN TWO weeks have passed since the publication of theMillbourn Committee's recommendations on the future ofLondon Airport. These were summarized in Flight lastveek. Public reaction to the suggestion that a further £17 million )f their money should be spent on an airport which will alreadylave cost nigh on £30 million has on the whole been mild, even hough this spending is proposed at a time when the nation isnore concerned than ever about its economy. The only real protest came from Lord Selborne. In a letter 0 The Daily Telegraph on August 5 he referred to "squander-nania"; and his criticisms were aimed at the planners who iesigned the original L.A.P. Central. They were not new criti-;isms, but they were worth repeating. We recall pertinent questions being asked about the wisdom of "upstairs-and-down-itairs" passenger handling when the original design was innounced, and we asked—and later expressed our doubts inprint—about the lack of consideration given to the American finger-and-gate system. (B.E.A. felt strongly about that onetoo—and said so at the time.) It can be argued that the public must accept continued expendi-ture on its airports and ground aids just as it approves expenditure an our antique road-system. It is of course the motorist whopays for new roads—and for much else besides—whereas the airlines pay only a fraction of the cost of the airports andfacilities they use. But air transport, which has been big busi- ness for only a dozen years, cannot yet afford to pay for theconsequences of its coil-spring expansion, and comparisons between the air and the old-established forms of transport such asshipping are false. The U.S.A., which possesses the world's most adult air transport industry, has paid up $325 million of tax-payers' money for the improvement of its airports and airways over the past ten years. Certainly we must have the best possible facilities upon whichto build our air commerce, but might we not do well to plan expen- sive expansions so that the nation does not find itself paying up—and being expected by the airlines to pay up—for ever? Sir William Hildred, director-general of the International Air Trans-port Association, prompted this question in his recent criticism of the Minister of Civil Aviation's decision to increase landingcharges. At a luncheon in Washington in May he said: — "About three weeks ago there was sitting on my right at a luncheonthe Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation in the United Kingdom. 1 mentioned, more in sorrow than in anger, what the British Govern-ment had just done with landing charges. They had shoved them up by a cruel percentage and he hadn't the grace even to apologize. Infact, when I said he had put them up thirty per cent, he interjected, 'in some cases fifty,' and was absolutely shameless about this. Thatis another thing we have to deal with." Sir William spares not even himself in his tireless andenlightened championship of his airlines, and the Minister prob- ably took his criticism in good part; but this is not—and evenSir William would agree—an outlook which the airlines can expect to maintain for ever. The Proposals With such thoughts in our minds we might take a closer lookat the Millbourn proposals and see whether the Minister's accept- ance of them as they stand is likely to embarrass his Ministry andthe Treasury fifteen years hence. The proposals are the outcome of 18 months' hard work by a committee composed of eightMinistry experts and a representative from each Corporation. Their report presents in broad-brushwork form a comprehensiveplan for the London Airport of 1970. It does not confuse the issue with detailed design-proposals, and its 16 pages are notablefor their lucid and reasoned appraisal of a big and complex problem. It is in fact a model of what all government planners'reports should be. It is not a cockshy; but neither is it final and conclusive, and therefore we might express a doubt or two aboutsome of its proposals. We remarked in a leading article last week that, in principle,an airport like London with a central island terminal is basically inflexible. It cannot be expanded without eliminating valuablerunways, which after all (and assuming continued technical improvements in A.T.C) should be the final limitation of an air-Port's capacity; and road and rail access requires very expensive tunnelling. There are other objections, such as awkward liaisonwith the engineering bases, but these are trivial compared with the basic problems of limited expansion-room (particularly for air-craft stands and car parks) and expensive access for the airport's customers. Our point was that no convincing case had been put for therejection of L.A.P. North as the long-haul terminal, and that transplanting it to the central island according to the original plan might be bitterly rued in the future. Although London'slong-haul traffic is in the minority (15 per cent) compared with short-haul, there can be no certain prediction that the proportionwill remain thus small. Long-haul business is about to be revolu- tionized by the DC-8 and 707 and by thrift-class fares; and,furthermore, the full impact of the big jets on terminal facilities— as the Millbourn report itself points out—cannot be exactly fore-seen. Refuelling, the loading and unloading of 150 passengers at a time, jet blast and noise, taxying and so on, are all problemswhich we may be underestimating. But even if the big jets were to present no operational difficultiesthe wisdom of putting long-haul traffic in the centre might still be questionable. The main argument against keeping the long-haulers out of the centre is to make the most economical use of a central area the boundaries of which are fixed, and which infuture years may need every bit of space for short-haul traffic. The fact that the big jets will require special terminal treatmentlends added weight to this argument. Bold Reconstruction The report says of London Airport North that "there is noroom for expansion." Everyone agrees that L.A.P. North is hopelessly inadequate and congested as it is, and that new per-manent buildings are urgently needed. But could not second thoughts be given to the possibility of its reconstruction, and itsoutward and inward expansion between No. 1 runway and the Bath Road? The present L.A.P. North area is a wastefullyunder-utilized shantytown of temporary huts: bold reconstruction and imaginatively economical use of space, and, at worst, diversionof the Bath Road (a scheme envisaged by L.A.P.'s previous planners), might achieve a terminal facility and aircraft parkingspace at least as spacious as is proposed for the long-haulers in the centre. It could be argued that in any case London Airport will runout of runway capacity before it runs out of terminal capacity, and that the central area is, in fact, large enough to handle allthe traffic that the runways can take with the advances in A.T.C. capacity foreseen by the report. What point, therefore, in sug-gesting that the central area's limited space be kept in hand by excluding the long-haulers? The answer is that we may be able to find ways of makinguse of L.A.P.'s runway capacity—i.e., A.T.C. capacity—more fully than we do at present. The Millbourn report bases its estimatesfor the future on the number of aircraft movements in peak periods : yet it is questionable whether we should plan expansionsbased on peak demands in only a few hours of the year. Are there not opportunities for economic incentives—such as differentialairport charges—designed to spread peak movements more evenly throughout the day or the week? Such charges would not beeasy to implement, nor would they be popular: but would they not be in accord with peak-demand practice in other forms ofbusiness? Acceptance by the airlines of differential charges (which, after all, they themselves apply to their own customers),or of other means of spreading the load, would be in accord with the need suggested earlier for a change of outlook by the industrytowards the facilities provided for it. Writing in the May 1957 issue of Shell Aviation News, Mr.S. F. Wheatcroft, economic adviser to RE.A., gave his personal views about the utilization of London Airport's facilities:— "It is worth noting that if the capacity of London Airport in 1955was reckoned at 35 movements an hour—not an unreasonable figure for a parallel-runway airport—the capacity utilization figure was only34 per cent. I am well aware that this figure may be regarded as dangerously misleading, but it does seem to me to be salutary, whenconsidering the duplication of a £30 million asset, to start off with the thought that the existing one is at present used at only one-third of itstheoretical capacity. ... It can be said, however, that the airlines are becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that, sooner or later, theywill have to pay the full cost of the airports they use and are, there- fore, seriously concerned about their efficiency and high utilization." His point was that a situation could arise in which demand foradditional capacity in the peak period might lead to the building of a new airport at a cost out of proportion to its value—an air-port which would never have been built if the peak traffic had been required to pay the full cost of the additional facilitiesneeded. The Millbourn report justifies its proposal to eliminate No. 4runway and to extend ominously close to the No. 6 parallel by pointing out that meteorological data show that the airport wouldbe 99.86 per cent usable without these N.W./S.E. runways, assuming that steady cross-wind components of up to 18 kt areacceptable. It may be true that these runways only have to (Continued at the foot of page 236)
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