HPF Chair’s Meeting Update 080926

Sometimes events have a habit of reinforcing the subject you are about to discuss.

As members of the Heathrow Passenger Forum (HPF) arrived for our September meeting, one remarked that the airport seemed unusually quiet. There were noticeably fewer aircraft landing and apparently nothing taking off.

We soon discovered why. A failure affecting the UK’s air traffic control system was causing major disruption at Heathrow and Gatwick. For several hours, aircraft movements were severely restricted, flights were cancelled or delayed, and incoming aircraft were diverted elsewhere.

Safety must always come first in aviation. Nobody on the HPF would argue otherwise. But the events unfolding around us provided an unusually vivid backdrop to one of the recurring themes of our meeting, resilience.

Heathrow has just come through another extremely busy summer. We heard that the airport handled its busiest ever day, with 272,000 passengers passing through, while dealing with more weather disruption and operational incidents than in previous years. Despite this, overall service performance remained above target, punctuality held up comparatively well and security performance was particularly strong.

That is encouraging. But resilience is not simply about coping well when things go wrong. It also means identifying vulnerabilities before they become problems.

The unusually hot and humid summer has placed additional pressure on airport infrastructure, while increasingly unpredictable weather raises questions about everything from cooling and drainage to the resilience of the wider power network. Years of constrained investment in replacing some airport assets add another dimension. These are exactly the sorts of issues that need to be addressed as Heathrow enters its next regulatory period.

There are also areas where passengers are not yet receiving the service they should. Passenger assistance remains a particular concern. Heathrow acknowledged that current performance is not where it needs to be following the transition to a new provider. The Forum will return to this in detail at our December meeting.

Much of our meeting was devoted to Heathrow's proposed expansion and the consultation expected to begin later this year. We discussed not simply a third runway, but the opportunity to modernise the existing airport, improve public transport connections, provide more predictable operations and create better facilities for passengers. We also discussed the importance of engaging properly with communities affected by expansion, including on noise, compensation and environmental impacts.

For the HPF, these issues are connected.

Passengers understandably judge an airport by the journey they experience today: whether their flight leaves on time, whether their baggage arrives, whether security works efficiently and whether assistance is there when they need it.

But our job is also to look further ahead.

Heathrow is operating close to the limits of its existing capacity while passenger expectations continue to rise. Investment in the current airport, the next regulatory settlement and the debate about expansion all therefore need to answer the same fundamental question:

Are we building an airport that is more resilient, more reliable and better able to serve passengers in the decades ahead ? The events taking place outside our meeting room last Tuesday were a timely reminder of why that question matters.