“If you think a third runway is unpopular, try mentioning ‘mixed mode’ in polite Home Counties company.”
That was the private response of one of the 16 transport secretaries this century when I asked whether they had considered allowing both runways at London Heathrow airport to be used for arrivals and departures at the same time.
The shorthand for this technique is “mixed mode”. For a government obsessively focused on growth, it could unlock extra capacity at the UK’s biggest hub for very little additional financial cost – but, as the erstwhile minister indicated, huge political cost.
At present, Heathrow dedicates one strip of asphalt to landings and the other to take-offs.
The only regular use of mixed mode is between 6am and 7am daily, the busiest hour for arrivals into the airport. Planes are allowed to land on both runways.
Intuitively, you might imagine that the most efficient way to operate a two-runway airport like Heathrow is to separate arrivals and departures. In fact, the opposite is true: you can extract more capacity if there is a plane coming into land a few seconds after an aircraft ahead has taken off.
Heathrow at its peak has a landing every 80 seconds and a take-off every 80 seconds. But across at Gatwick, air-traffic controllers can manage an arrival and a departure in as little as 65 seconds. Mixed mode adds capacity without the need for another runway.
When Sir Howard Davies’s Airport Commission looked into mixed mode, they concluded: “The increased operational flexibility could be used to enhance the resilience of the airport’s operations.”
Monday was messy this week at Heathrow: 36 flights were cancelled, affecting 5,000 passengers and one Qatar Airways A380 “SuperJumbo” diverted to Amsterdam after a missed approach because there was not room in the system to accommodate another go.
Such disruption could become much more rare if Heathrow was open to receiving more flights. Of more interest to the airlines – and, by extension, passengers keen on more choice and lower fares – is that the technique could allow up to 60,000 more flights each year.
One senior travel industry figure strongly advocates using mixed mode to increase capacity immediately. Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency, flies through Heathrow at least twice a…
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