Heathrow’s third runway plan faces further delay of at least two years

Heathrow’s plans for a third runway face at least another two-year delay, its management admitted on Friday, amid calls for the GBP14b project to be shelved. John Holland-Kaye, CE, signalled that the airport would have to take a decision at a later date on whether it went ahead with the runway in light of the turbulence in the aviation market. If it did go ahead, the runway would not be completed until the beginning of the 2030s because of the coronavirus crisis and an appeal in court. “If we are successful in protecting and building the UK economy we will need that third runway, whether it’s in 10 or 15 years’ time I don’t know,” he said. “We’re privately funding it ourselves so we will have to make a rational decision about making that investment. But I think the UK will need it.” Heathrow expected passenger numbers to have plunged by 97% in April. It warned the UK government needed to signal within the next week how flying could restart, or there would be mass redundancies across the industry. “We’re at a critical point, a knife-edge, where those decisions are going to be made in the next month or two. If the government wants to save jobs it needs to be out there committing to working on this common international standard [for safe air travel to encourage passengers to fly],” said Holland-Kaye. These internationally agreed standards would include temperature checks at all airports and mandatory face mask-wearing but Holland-Kaye warned that social distancing would not work at airports.<br/>