Heathrow Airport won’t be able to meet rising demand for travel without a third runway, its chief executive has said.
Asked whether the West-London hub would have sufficient capacity to meet growing travel demand, Thomas Woldbye told City A.M. “in the long term, no.”
His comments come after Heathrow reported record passenger numbers over the first half of the year, helping it turn a tidy £178m profit. Traffic has soared over the last two years as travellers satiate pent-up demand for holidays following years of Covid-19 era lockdowns.
The airport’s long-delayed expansion plans represent a more permanent, long-term solution to capacity challenges. In the short term, it has been exploring more modest solutions, such as more efficient use of the runway.
“No matter how fast we realise it, the runway project will take quite a number of years before it’s here. We need to also address the period in between and then of course, we are looking at what does long term growth look like,” Woldbye said.
The future of the third runway has been a hugely contested topic in British politics over the last twenty years and it is still uncertain whether it will ever be completed. There is not currently any application by Heathrow to push forward with the project and the UK’s largest airport has been coy in recent months when discussing its plans.
However, in a significant vote of confidence, the new Labour government on Monday signalled it was “open-minded” about airport expansion.
“We are really appreciative of the government understanding the economic importance of aviation and of Heathrow in particular and the need to expand capacity. We’d like to work with him on that,” Woldbye told City A.M.
He said the third runway, as part of its long-term strategy, had “not changed… It is more about how and when can we put it into place in the right way and obviously, since the project was conceived before COVID, there’s a lot of updating to do before we can seriously start to talk to other stakeholders about it, but of course we will do that.”
He added: “This is a huge project and I think people sometimes underestimate the time it takes to get it updated and get a full understanding of what it means to both our airlines and the society around us.
“That is just an enormous task and and we have had to ramp that up. After COVID, we didn’t have the people to do it. Now we do and we’re working on it, but it just takes time.”
A positive announcement surrounding Heathrow’s third runway proposals would do much to quell growing criticism surrounding the airport’s creaking infrastructure.
In June, the boss of Emirates, Sir Tim Clark, described the hub as “dismal and dilapidated” and likened the facilities to that of a Second World War airport. Of particular concern for Clark was Terminal three.
But Woldbye refuted the claims. “No, I do not agree with that. I think we have an excellent airport that the UK can rightfully be proud of.
“Are there areas where we like to improve all the time? Absolutely. Do we have infrastructure which is old in some areas, of course. We’re not like an airline that can change aircraft overnight.
Regarding Terminal three, Woldbye said executives had been “doing a lot of work” to improve passenger experience. “That’s why it looks a bit messier right now because we’re changing the whole security setup, we are taking away offices so we get more daylight through the windows and so on.”
Whatever the case may be, Heathrow’s long term future will rest in the hands of new owners; the French buyout group Ardian and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).