Six reasons why Heathrow is not the UK's hub airport | Hacker News Reader

Six reasons why Heathrow is not the UK's hub airport

tomforth.co.uk

4 pointschippy3 comments

Strange that nowhere in the article does it mention that LHR only has two parallel runways. Compare to other hubs. E.g. Atlanta's ATL has five, and Dallas's DFW has seven.

As Wikipedia puts it [1]:

   With only two runways, operating at over 98%
   of their capacity, Heathrow has little room
   for more flights

It's hard to be "the" hub airport until that problem is solved.

Edit: just looked up Amsterdam's AMS runway situation. They have six. It's hard for me to understand how someone writes an article like this without understanding such very very basic facts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow#Regulation

The author just chose to look at the externalities - few passengers choose an airport because of the number of runways. They make their selection based on various criteria, many of which the author captured in this article. The number of runways is just one of the factors that percolate upwards and result in a score for price, connectivity, local transport etc.

It's true that the number or runways is "just one of the factors", but it's by far the most important one. The author's list doesn't really matter if Heathrow's runways are fully utilized.

So when the author says

   From Heathrow you can fly to seven places
   in the UK. From Manchester you can fly to
   thirteen. It's hardly a hub airport if you
   can't use it as a hub is it?

his argument is pointless. You CAN'T grow from seven places to thirteen places without being able to take off or land the planes!!!

The author keeps making the same mistake when he says

   You can fly from Amsterdam Schiphol airport
   to a whopping twenty-four airports in the UK!

Well, duh! Schiphol has seven runways, Heathrow has two. That's the biggest problem with Heathrow. It's full.

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