The Minister is preparing to quickly track the redesign of London’s airspace as the UK government shakes towards the back of airport expansion to promote economic growth.
Aviation Minister Mike Kane will plan to Parliament next week for a “airspace design service,” which will redraw the flight paths that aircraft will use to take off and land at London airports.
“To grow the sector and implement expansion plans, we need to create new direct flight routes so that travel is more efficient and airports can coordinate more flights to more destinations,” Kane said in a statement in the Financial Times.
The modernization of British airspace infrastructure, first designed in the 1950s and 1960s, promises to provide faster flights that release pollution.
However, redesigns can prove controversy. The flight path changes will ultimately apply to all London airports, including Heathrow and Gatwick, allowing previously unaffected communities to be exposed to noise pollution.
“It’s fair to say there are winners and losers,” said someone directly involved in mapping the new flight route.
Today, flight paths are based on a fixed network of “waypoints” established decades ago, reflecting the location of largely outdated ground navigation beacons.
The system was designed in the 1950s, with around 200,000 flights remaining in the year landing in the UK, but now compared to over 2 million.
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The government supports expansion at London’s major airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and City, and will further increase pressure on busy airspace.
The third runway in Heathrow alone can add 250,000 flights a year.
Environmental groups say airport expansion is not compatible with emission reductions as the industry is struggling to decarbonize. However, Kane said the “key to promoting prosperity across the country” and that redesigning the airspace will “turbo-charge” industry growth.
Lee Boulton, head of airspace development at National Air Traffic Services (NATS), a UK air traffic control provider, said the redrawing airspace gives carriers the freedom to fly directly through routes using satellite navigation.
He added that it will expand traffic and far less intervention from air traffic controllers.
The British government has been working on airspace modernization for ten years, but progress has slowed.
The purpose of the new airspace design service, overseen by the NAT and originally proposed by the Minister and Aviation Regulators last fall, is to create a single “guide mind” to coordinate changes around each airport.
Boulton said redrawing the so-called highways in the sky around the capital was “very complicated and very expensive.”
“There are so many modeling and processes to compare the benefits of what you’re proposing to what’s there today. There’s an almost endless way in which you can develop airspace,” he said.
EasyJet Planes is a queue for taking off at Gatwick Airport. Low-cost carriers estimate that if they could fly more direct routes, they could potentially reduce their carbon emissions by 10% ©Gareth Fuller/PA
In April, urging the minister to speed up approval of the proposed second runway, Gatwick has already redesigned the local airspace and redesigned the route flying between the ground and the 7,000 feet.
Andy Sinclair, head of noise and airspace strategy at the UK’s second-largest airport, said he is preparing for public consultations on the plan, taking into account “thousands” of different routes.
“The requirement for an airspace modernization strategy is to start with a blank paper, not get in the way of today’s stuff,” he said.
The priority is to reduce the impact on noise when designing routes below 4,000 feet, which are the final approach or takeoff of the flight.
Local campaigners say they are still afraid of new flight routes and that increasingly concentrated routes could collide with home prices.
However, airlines are welcoming this change as a way to reduce flight times, save money and fuel, and reduce emissions.
Low-cost carrier EasyJet estimates that improving European airspace could result in a 10% reduction in carbon emissions if they could fly more directly.
“Modernizing Airspace is the fastest and most cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions and is a key component of the industry’s decarbonization methods.”
