Flights from Heathrow to China etc.

1. Let's take the facts as stated in a recent Evening Standard article as given:

- London's four main airports are running at capacity.
- London businesses want there to be more direct flights from London to the BRIC countries, Brazil, India, China etc.
- People who live near the airports don't want any more flights or runways because of the noise.
- Expanding airport capacity is not only politically difficult but also very expensive and takes years to sort out.

2. What you also have to know is that inbound tourism is hugely important to the London economy, foreign visitors spend £13.6 billion a year in London; and that London airports employ 100,000 people directly and handle about a million aircraft movements a year.

3. What would be nice to know is quite how airline landing slots are allocated, it appears to be a bizarre mixture of old international treaties which nobody dares break; what the government of the day thinks; all sorts of back room deals between airlines, airport operators, regulators, local councils, EU subsidies; and the grey market in slots. But we'll never find out, so we'll have to assume that the system is half-way rational.

4. Heathrow is mainly international stuff, it handles 2.7 million passengers a year to/from the USA and 1.9 million to/from Dubai. But there are plenty of local flights as well (i.e. where a journey by train would be a reasonable alternative): 1.2 million to/from Manchester and Newcastle. And there are also 2.7 million to/from Amsterdam and Paris, not only are those journeys do-able by train but I believe that a lot of those people then take connecting flights to elsewhere.

5. Again, AFAIAA, the reason why people go via Amsterdam or Paris is because of the stupid Air Passenger Duty - you pay a much smaller amount to fly there than you would if you flew direct (there's little or no APD on the main onward flight). Which is a wildly inefficient use of people's time (queuing up twice over) and airline fuel (aeroplanes are quite efficient when they are whizzing along, what wastes fuel is landing and taking off). And it means that those airports earn money which we could be earning instead.

6. So how about we just accept that the total number of aircraft movements is fixed and a given and that air travel does place a burden on others? Aircraft noise is annoying, but whether an aircraft flies over your house on a short haul to Leeds-Bradford airport or to Hong Kong doesn't make any difference.

7. So it strikes me, all they have to do is reduce the number of short haul flights and use those slots for long haul to the BRIC countries instead. Instead of flying people to Amsterdam or Paris who then get on another aeroplane to elsewhere, we can send them straight where they want to go. And instead of ferrying people to and from the rest of England, we can use those slots for taking people on long haul flights etc.

UPDATE: Jorge in the comments points out that a passenger only gets the APD saving if he books two entirely separate flights, e.g. one from London to Paris and then another from Paris to [end destination]. If you book "[End destination] via Paris" then you pay full APD. I would have hoped that was clear anyway.

8. As mentioned, nobody really knows how the airlines end up with the slots they end up with, but the best thing the government could do in the short term is to replace the counter-productive Air Passenger Duty (revenues £3 billion a year) with a flat rate duty of £3,000 per plane per landing/take-off (or whatever is needed to make the figures balance, or maybe £5,000 for Heathrow and £500 for Leeds-Bradford). That would give the airlines every incentive to shift from short to long haul, take away a bit of business from the Dutch and the French, make internal flights more expensive (thus encouraging people to use rail or road) and make international flights cheaper.

9. Pretty much a win-win, in other words.

10. It's a bit like Land Value Tax for the airspace. It makes the airlines pay for the external cost (the noise pollution); it means less fuel per passenger-mile on average; it brings business to the UK; and it's a levy on the monopoly value of the slots - the highest price ever paid for the best slots was $52 million each, i.e. the value of the right to land and take off once, on one day a year, for the foreseeable is £90,000 (and that's the net value after deducting the Air Passenger Duty, which can be over £10,000 per plane if you're going far enough), which amortised over ten years is £9,000 per flight, so a £5,000 per flight duty wouldn't even make a dent in that.

UPDATE: Jorge points out another advantage, it's better use of a slot if a large aeroplane takes hundreds of people a long way instead of a small aeroplane etc. Yes, from the point view of the slot owner (the airline) obviously, but I believe that by and large large aeroplanes make more noise than small ones, so the argument that the per-plane duty is a charge for the noise pollution would be weakened.