Looking forward to listening to this week’s SModcast!  The fact that it is called “SModcast 106: Go F— Yourself Southwest Airlines” on iTunes is a bit of an indication that he has not been mollified…

1. Top tip: try quoting that saying to the Toyota PR department if you want to see an example of spontaneous human combustion!

We saw the picture of the plane, nose down in the snow, and were more than a little concerned.  Was anyone hurt? we wondered.  There is no sound on the TV feed on these screens, but Jim saw the banner text going across it and passed on the news “all passengers were removed safely”.  While we were all breathing a sigh of relief he followed up with “but they’ll want their pound back!” and hilarity ensued.

I guess you had to be there, but it really tickeld me.

BAA’s owners have scotched rumours that the sale of Gatwick Airport could be imminent.

Before I had even opened the paper there were headlines on the screens at work, which display a tickertape of the BBC RSS feed, saying that the sale of Gatwick had been agreed. Oops This could be a good thing for Gatwick and consequently for all the local businesses that are dependent on it one way or another.  BAA have never really made any secret of the fact that they see Heathrow as their flagship, and it has always been obvious that Heathrow is their priority.

This is not just about expansion, but also about contraction.  With falling demand for air travel, you just know BAA would want to make sure Heathrow kept its critical mass and so would make sure that Gatwick suffered more.  At the very least it has always seemed to encourage the impression that Heathrow is for serious business travel and Gatwick is for lower-priced, lower-margin holiday flights.

In other words, exactly the sort of monopolistic, anti-competitive behaviour that led to the demand for BAA to sell off some of its airports.

This may mean that the new owners of Gatwick will press for a second runway, even if Heathrow and Stanstead build new runways – BAA would have hated the idea of a new runway at Gatwick if it made another one at Heathrow less likely – but that is another matter, and probably not a pressing issue the way civil aviation is at the moment.

What it could mean is that Gatwick will actively try and get more operators to shift routes from Heathrow which would be a boost here, and may even lead to a more balanced division of air traffic, which in turn could lead to less demand for an extra runway altogether.

Or not.  What do I know?   Whatever GIP’s agenda is for Gatwick at least it will not be such a hidden one.

Sometimes I would turn up at the airport 10 minutes before a flight was due to take off and have to rush through the terminal to catch it, although that was down to the Piccadilly Line rather than through choice.

Now you have to be there at least two hours before the flight to check in, effectively adding 90 minutes to a journey.

This time around the whole trip was a pain. Literally.  I don’t think that anyone at the airport or on the plane did anything wrong, its just the way it was.   Almost as soon as I sat in the seat I had a stiff neck, and knew it was not going to get any better after two-and-half-hours sitting there.  I had an aisle seat, which did not help either.  With such narrow aisles everybody who goes past nudges you, and the staff are backwards and forwards all the time.

Jayne had it even worse.  She was in the aisle seat opposite me and had a couple of incontinents sitting next to her so she had to keep getting up to let them out.  Charlie really drew the short straw coming home: he ended up next to a screaming baby.

Fortunately I wasn’t interested in watching the in-flight movies.  I think I would have been very frustrated if I had.  The films were shown on screens hanging from the centre of the aisles.  Every so often the film would freeze  whenever there was an announcement to be made.  When it came to meal time the trolley was parked by our seats while the crew dished out meals: had I been trying to watch the film, I would have been unable to see it for about fifteen minutes.

All in all the flight is now something to be endured rather than enjoyed.  I’m certainly thinking that my next holiday is going to be either in Britain or via a ferry or the Eurostar.   The ironic thing is that so many people still see air travel as a luxury, when it is no better than any other form of public transport.

The only upside was that the new futile security restrictions (futile because they only address the last terrorist attempt – not the next one) do mean a more stringent approach to hand luggage.  Even when I was only going somewhere overnight I would check a bag in with everything in it so I could travel very light.  Meanwhile anybody else going overnight was trying to carry everything on the plane with them.  They were coming on with suit carriers, suitcases, all to save a few minutes by not having to go to baggage reclaim.  It meant that I could hardly find room to put my coat in the storage because it would be full of luggage…

The distance between Heathrow and Gatwick is about 25 miles as the crow flies.  On the current roads you could travel between them in an hour if you were very lucky.  On a direct road you could do it in half an hour.  On a direct rail link you could do it in as little as 6 minutes.  Theoretically.

I’m not talking about something like the Gatwick Express that just puts different rolling stock on the same tracks as existing services with a little bit of separation of platforms, but a purpose-built, absolutely straight, state-of-the-art rail link.  Possibly even using maglev technology, preferably in a straight tunnel.

You cut come corners, and cause a bit more disruption, by using a deep cut & cover tunnel instead of boring as far as possible, but it would have to be dead straight so the trains can get to a fast cruising speed quickly and stick at that speed.

Maglevs are easily capable of over 300mph,((4000mph if you put them in a vacuum but that is a bit ambitious and not necessary))  but even an average of 250mph for the whole journey would mean a 6-minute trip.  That is not a train journey: that is just a shuttle between terminals.  With that sort of link you could treat Gatwick and Heathrow as a single airport and its combined number of terminal and runways would let it function as a decent hub.  If I remember rightly, it can easily take a lot more than 6 minutes to get from one gate to another in Singapore airport.  I reckon you should aim for speeds that would enable a PR-friendly 5-minute journey, but personally I would be happy with 6.

Not only that, but it would reduce a lot of congestion on the south-west bit of the M25 and surrounding areas as those people living near Gatwick who got transferred to Heathrow could just go to their nearest airport and shuttle across – they could even do it by an expanded Fastway instead of driving.

Drawbacks?  Well it would be very expensive, but an investment for the future as long as the link was more future-proofed than Birmingham’s ill-fated maglev.  It would also cause a shift in certain air traffic over time.

If the scheduled flights that rely on a hub-based network did expand, as predicted, they would force out some of the charter flights which would take up any unused capacity at Stanstead or Luton.  Very bad for those of us living in the shadow of Gatwick who may want to take a holiday sometime, but a serious upgrade of the ‘Thameslink’  line from Gatwick to Luton would help there, as would a more direct link to Stanstead.   But that is a selfish view from a local: most people outside Sussex, Surrey and this end of Kent would find it just as easy to get to Luton or Stanstead if that happened.

If the other predictions hold true instead – that air traffic will not grow in the way the airlines and governments say – then we still have a lot more flexibility, a world-beating transport link and the other potential benefits to anybody working at Heathrow or Gatwick rather than a white elephant runway.

So whichever of the opposing groups are right with their forecasts it would be a good thing.

Needs a more rigorous feasibility study than the one I did on the back of a fag packet, but I like the idea.  Far more practical than most of my transport ideas.¹

1. The less said about the pogo zimmer frame the better I think

NOGAR are right that anyone buying Gatwick will want to add a runway if they can.  BAA really did not want to have an extra runway -I think their overall plan depends on Heathrow having the sort of size and capability to compete with Frankfurt, Schipol and Roissy so they always favoured expansion there and saw expansion of Gatwick as a threat to that.  It was not in BAA’s interest for Gatwick to steal business from Heathrow, but it will be entirely in the interests of a new owner to compete for passengers with Heathrow.

There is a lot of talk about the notorious 2019 agreement.  Both councils (county and borough) have talked about wanting to extend it.  Any new buyer would never do that voluntarily.  BAA could possibly do it to protect them from future competition, but that would make Gatwick far less attractive and drop the price a lot.  With the way things are today BAA will want as much as they can get from the sale.  2019 is now not so far away.  By the time a sale goes through it will only be 10 years before someone could start building one, and only five or six years before they could start the planning.

A so-called close-parallel runway within the current boundaries of the airport might not be too bad, but no operator would want it because it would be hugely expensive with only a relatively small increase in capacity.  It would effectively kill off any chance of further runways so for the local area it would be a case of having up to 50% increase in passengers against a 50% chance of a 100% increase.  Whether you favour it would depend on your approach to gambling.

The timing of the sale is unfortunate.  It makes the ideal solution totally impractical – for Crawley council to buy the airport.  Seriously.  Other local authorities run airports, the most prominent example in the UK is Manchester.  On the plus side, the council would have control of expansion if it owned the airport, and BAA would be really pleased to sell to somebody who didn’t have plans to compete with Heathrow.  As a profitable business it could even subsidise the council’s services.  One tiny little barrier is that slthough Crawley council is very, very well-off by the standards of councils, with something like £100million in the bank that is still about £1.9billion short of the asking price.

That is why the timing is unfortunate.  In happier times the council could conceivably have borrowed enough to buy Gatwick and then used the operating profits to pay off the loan.  In happier times it would even have been possible to raise that sort of money, but this is not the time to expect those sort of sums to get lent, especially when the aviation industry is a bit flaky so the returns are far less certain.  Joining a consortium would be more feasible, but the types of organisation that would be interested in that would also be interested in expansion.

Maybe the timing is not so unfortunate after all…  Imagine if the council did operate the airport…  at some point it would end up relying on the income, like it used to rely on the business rates from the airport but on a bigger scale.  If Heathrow started taking the market share then you could end up with the council needing expansion but not wanting it.  So, probably not such a good idea then, but you have to admit it would be interesting.

This whole airport sell-off business could have a big impact on the Crawley/Horsham/Horley area.  If BAA can’t keep all of their airports it is a dead certainty that Heathrow is the one they will keep, so what would happen to Gatwick if it was under new ownership?

For a start, expansion  would be higher up the agenda.  At the moment Gatwick is in competition with Heathrow but BAA/Ferrovial have Heathrow as their priority and concentrate on that.  I think that new owners would want Gatwick to compete more aggressively.  Whether that is a good or bad thing for anyone here really depends on whether their job depends on the airport and how close they live to it.

Any growth of Gatwick would have mixed impacts and be the cause of intense local debate but we would soon notice if there was any contraction of business there: the airport has a big impact on the economy of Crawley, but also in Horsham, Horley, East Grinstead and even places like Tonbridge, Croydon, Redhill and beyond would be affected.

But what if the new owners were Virgin, or a consortium containing Virgin?   Many airports have strategic alliances with airlines (Heathrow/BA, Gatwick/British Caledonian, Roissy/Air France) but are their cases of shared ownership anywhere?   It gives us something to speculate on now that the transfer window is closed.

One likely scenario could be the withdrawal of BA from Gatwick.  BA and Virgin have had what could charitably be called a bumpy relationship over the years.  You can imagine that Virgin would get priority over BA in all sorts of way and that, combined with BA not wanting their passengers to disembark into a terminal chock full of Virgin branding would make them inclined to transfer services to Heathrow.

Interesting times.

It turns out I got it wrong – anyone can enjoy them, but the danger is that you will end up as a hardcore plane-spotter!

I took the camera along, not expecting too much by way of results.  A compact digital camera with a measly 3x optical zoom is going to going to take a lot of pictures that are just tiny dark dots in a large sky, and I did get quite a few of those, but there were also some I was quite pleased with.  Even better, I finally had a chance to use the binoculars that I got for Christmas last year.

I was quite excited with anticipation of two things about this show: seeing the Airbus A380 in action and seeing the newly restored Vulcan bomber actually flying.  Neither disappointed, but there were plenty of surprises as well.  The first was as we were entering the place and an American jet fighter took off.  The noise was astonishing and then immediately amusing as umpteen car alarms all went off together as a consequence.

I had not been prepared for the sheer scale of the event.  We drove there and the entire area had its roads re-configured for the duration, with police directing traffic and excellent temporary signage up everywhere.  We parked in an enormous field, where many stewards guided us and were then herded onto one of a continuous stream of shuttle buses to go to the main gate.  Very impressive organisation.

As we were there at the invitation of Thales we went to their exhibition space, which we all agreed must have been the best in the place – a four-storey building with exhibitions on the ground floor, meeting rooms on a mezzanine, a restaurant above that and a top-floor bar with terrace overlooking the airfield.  The terrace had the best view of the show it was possible to have.  The pavilion was crowded with kids who were taking part in some sort of competition.  I think they were from schools either local to Farnborough or to Thales facilities and it was good to see the company with an eye on attracting future talent and not just concentrating on short-term sales targets.

We had a couple of cokes and watched the Red Arrows do a display.   What they do is so unfeasible that I can only believe it is possible because I have seen it: I would not believe it otherwise.  Perfect formation at high speeds, no margin for error, they even take off in formation so close they are almost touching.

In a world where two planes getting within half a mile counts as a near miss incident it is breathtaking to see such manoeuvres.  It truly makes you proud to be British: they have to be the best in the world. Another source of national pride is the Spitfire, and it was great to see one of those flying around.

What I was waiting for was the A380 and it was worth the wait.  It is the aeronautical equivalent of the fat bloke who is a surprisingly good dancer and light on his feet.  It is such a huge plane but it took off in a very short distance, climbing more steeply than you would have thought possible, before going into a series of banks and turns that are more becoming of a small stunt plane.  It must be great for the pilots to have the chance to do all that – they won’t be able to do it with passengers on board.

And it was so quiet: it hardly seemed to make a sound. Jayne was totally gobsmacked when she saw the initial climb.  Time to be hugely proud to be European, and that continued with the appearance of the Eurofighter.

It was not as impressive as the F-22 Raptor (which was sadly not present for the public days) but a lot better than I expected.  It was follo

wed by an F-16 and an F-18 and all three were remarkable for how much they could do, and how slow they could go when they needed to.  These things appear to break the laws of physics by being able to turn on a sixpence.  Probably something to do with thrust vectoring…

There was a tilt rotor machine as well, which can work like a turbo prop plane but swivel its wings so the propellors point up and then work like a helicopter.  We enjoyed that, and then came something we enjoyed a lot more than we could have hoped for – the C-27J cargo plane.  Its a big utility plane for shifting cargo or carrying casualties or troops.  It should not have been able to do stunts, but it did – including a knife-edge pass.

So many good things.  I could go on for ages, but the highlight was seeing that Vulcan fly.  It has spent nearly ten years being restored and is now the only Vulcan able to fly.  It only recently got complete and certifiedand made its first public flight only two weeks ago.  Its big, graceful, and good-looking, but you can really tell the differe

nce between it and the modern planes.  No way could it have done the sort of things that even the Airbus was doing, but like the dancing bear of legend it is not that it danced well but that it could dance at all- not that it danced too badly mind.

Getting home was more of a challenge.  The bus shuttle service worked well enough but the parking field was total chaos.  All those stewards were nowhere to be seen. They were all at the gates, but there was nobody to stop the middle of the field becoming the mother of all traffic jams.  It took us more than an hour to get out of that field.  I can now understand how some cars ended up stuck all night trying to get out of the car park at Knebworth after the Robbie Williams concert.

But we had such a good time during the day that we were able to stay quite relaxed about the whole thing.  We saw lots of neat planes, Jayne and Chrystal nabbed lots of free bags, pens, and other stuff (they both agree that the Thales bags were the best), and I even got a sun tan somehow. When we were driving through torrents at 8:30am we all thought the day would be a wash-out but it didn’t rain at all while we were there.

My only regret was not being able to join my colleagues in Horsham to go out and talk to voters in the Carfax, but the airshow only comes round every two years and I may not ever get the chance to sample corporate hospitality at the event so I had to seize the day.

Despite a camera not really suited to snapping planes in flight I took more than 80 photos – at least a third of them featuring the A380 -and I was happy with quite a few of them.  Most are online at Flickr.