I'm against the BAA monopoly over our airports and the expansion of Heathrow, although for very different reasons to most of these people. That said, you have to wonder if this lady was infiltrated into the ranks of the climate change protesters so as to discredit their cause irreparably...
Anne Notley, of West Sussex, also came along for the day. "I feel that middle-class professional people have to make a stand because we are among the worst culprits. I have been a culprit too," she said.
"We were going to fly to Greece to adopt two dogs but now we have decided to take a driving trip instead.
"It's not much but I'm making a change."
2 comments:
Richard, that article that you link to has some inaccuracies in it and is peddling some spurious arguments when it talks about developing routes from Scotland – and I appreciate it’s a few of years old. We are lumbered with two largish airports too close to each other in Glasgow and Edinburgh. A country of our size cannot sustain enough routes from two airports in such a way. The BAA would dearly love to see expansion at both Edinburgh and Glasgow but take a look at the statistics sometime; they paint a very different picture. Glasgow is stagnating and not because of Heathrow. The economics of operating a hub system or indeed most any airline system are complex and tricky. Ryanair have done a great job with Prestwick but it could all change in a heartbeat. The Scottish Executive's fund for encouraging new carriers is not working as they wanted it to (around a third of flights that have started under the scheme have stopped). In fact the situation that the airline business is facing could lead us to some very unpalatable, for Scotland, situations.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the BAA will be broken up. But it might not all be good news. Having said that if an airport operator bought say Gatwick and Glasgow - they would work hard to have traffic flow between the two as well as to try and divert business away from their rivals. However, it’s not as simple as that! Although in the short term we'd see some interesting moves
Fair point, Richard. My only argument at the time was that 'liberated', if that's the word, from the control of BAA, we might see a more entrepreneurial approach to the running of Scotland's airports.
Having seen the problems which occurred when Dundee Airport was run by the city council and how it has begun to flourish since being taken over by HIAL, I'm not sure I'd want to rehash my argument about airports being run by local authorities if I were to write the same piece again.
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