UK airport capacity – Unravelling the Conundrum

The debate about the UK’s airports and their present and future runway capacity – or lack of it – has occupied a multitude of media column inches in Britain and throughout the world and generated enough hot air to fill a fleet of Montgolfier balloons.

The Davies (or Airports) Commission is supposed to be the end game of a process that began over a decade ago with a government White Paper, the Future of Air Transport, and which has witnessed a whole series of twists and turns since that would do justice to an Agatha Christie “whodunit?” novel. In reality the process actually began with a series of botched attempts to decide on a location for a third London airport that can be traced back to the 1940s.

The Davies Commission is due to make its interim report by the end of 2013 and its final report in 2015, possibly just after a mandatory General Election takes place. The new government could take onboard what it says, kick it back into the long grass, or go for a compromise. To reach any sort of recommendation the Commission must plough through a mountain of evidence that already stacks up to close on 200MB of data, and counting. There are a myriad of conflicting opinions to examine and reconcile.

Whatever decision they come to will have a disproportionate importance compared to the declining influence of Great Britain on the world’s aviation stage. Passenger and cargo airlines (especially those flying into the UK or intending to), airports operators in the UK and abroad, supply chain firms, infrastructure investors, construction companies, government departments, municipal authorities, environmental groups, lawyers, academics and many others need to keep abreast of events and understand who are the main players, who is likely to come out on top and what it will mean for them.

UK Airport Capacity – Unravelling the Conundrum, researched and written by David James Bentley, is a 100,000 word report, to be published at the end of September 2013, that cuts to the chase, delivering searching analysis and decisive verdicts on the hopes and aspirations of the main contenders and assessment of the likely winners and losers, in a single, easy to read document, coloured with political insights and spiced with occasional dashes of Bentley’s unique brand of observational humour.

David Bentley has previously written 13 management reports on airport financing and privatisation, security, low cost airports and airline globalisation and financing; subscribed to by clients in over 100 countries. From 2004 to February 2013 he was Editor of the leading subscriber report Airport Investor Monthly report, overseeing the production of 100 editions.