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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Heathrow isn't the only airport near London so redundancy is already built

Yes and no. The vast majority of commercial flights what would have landed at Heathrow today won't be landing at a different London airport instead. There isn't spare, redundant capacity for that. Instead the flights will be cancelled.

https://www.thelocal.dk/20250321/sas-cancels-flights-from-no...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly6e24q8glo

But that's not a national security concern. That's just an annoyance.

For national security London and UK can scramble several other airports for important flights.

If by "national security issue" we mean "can the UK move military aircraft and important people" then no, Heathrow isn't key at all. There are other airbases and airports.

If we mean that a long outage would have economic impact and is hard to find the capacity elsewhere, then yes. As per grandparent post "take down one of Europe’s largest airports and global air travel".

Yeah well, not everything that annoys people and loses bussinesses money is a "national security issue", no matter how far the US overton window shifted on that matter.

A core goal of national security is protecting critical civilian infrastructure.

Always has been, always will be.

The problem is they’re all maxed out. So if one closes unexpectedly the others can’t just pick up the slack because they have no room…

So the solution to avoiding a few days of a LHR-sized gap in airport throughput is to build a permanent LHR-sized surplus?

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