Insufficient airport capacity has long been a serious problem for UK aviation. It is misleading to think of any decision about a hub airport in the south-east as a choice between either Heathrow or Gatwick. Although there have been earlier proposals to run the two airports as one, those proposals considered only partial solutions.
Merging the working of the two sites can be most effectively achieved by building a new runway at Gatwick, a direct high-speed rail connection with a parallel motorway linking the two sites, and running the combined airports with an integrated communications system.
That would provide four essential benefits. Additional runway capacity at Gatwick is cheaper, would be quicker to build, avoids the problems of even greater atmospheric and noise pollution over the densely populated London suburbs, and a merged system would greatly increase passenger and freight hub capacity. This proposal and its estimated cost can be found at radicalpossibilities.org
Walter Barker and Michael Wadsworth
Bristol
• That the government should even be thinking about expanding airports during the Paris climate talks shows just how fragile our commitment to tackling climate change really is. Flying makes a huge contribution to our greenhouse gas emissions but, like driving, it’s something politicians and much of the public choose to ignore. So your headline “Heathrow decision delay will provoke fury but little surprise” (11 December) may be true of those few who stand to make money out of airport expansion. But the rest of us should think about how to shrink airports, not to expand them.
Jon Reeds
London
• Probably wise of Cameron to delay a decision about another runway. If he leads the UK out of the EU, we won’t need it.
David Simpson
Datchet, Berkshire
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