Hmmm.
I'm not sure I agree with the anti-airport logic - looks false to me. After all, how far is Stanstead from anywhere else? How close are Heathrow Gatwick and Stanstead? The point is not where customers are coming from so much as where the flights are going to. Bristols list of destinations is really quite limited.
Trouble is the airlines won't go anywhere until they are sure that customers will come. Stanstead is 40miles from the centre of London, Lyneham is 90miles, if it takes an hour to get to Stanstead it'll take 2 to get to Lyneham.
I'm more anti-another thing people will laugh at Swindon for than anything else (I'm also perhaps rather too cynical). As I said if this had been done 15 years ago it could have been a winner.
As for Eddy's 'plan B' - you could ascribe exactly the same list of objects to its location as to the airport. It also has the de-ja-vu ring of 'back of a fag packet' thinking to it. Maybe I'm being unfair, but where's the detail?
- Is he proposing to fund it?
- Is there a realistic potential customer base for a 'theme park'?
- Is the commercial operation and the rather vacuous sounding 'greenification' aspects there as soft-soap to get the HOUSING (the bit he'll make his money on) nodded through? Looks like spin to me.
I agree. Thing is Wiltshire council has to get houses built somewhere, ideally close to Swindon and they get to decide if Lyneham should be earmarked for housing or not in their local development plan. Housing could cause them short-term pain, but in the long term people will forget (how many remember the battles over the front garden development in Swindon).
Given the construction costs of building an airfield and its associated infrastructure are impossibly huge, given that we have under capacity with our existing airports, doing anything else with the place other than flying aircraft out of it seems stoopidly wasteful to me:
- Locals are already used to the air traffic (probably more numerous and noisy as military traffic than the commercial)
- It's located very close to the M4 (an advantage NOT shared by Bristol or Bournemouth airports). In fact, its '1 hour from Bristol, Birmingham or London' is an ADVANTAGE as it could draw custom from any one of the three locations
- Its relatively close to a main railway link
- We'd finally have some viable custom for all of the bloody hotels springing up like toadstools across the town
You still need to build a terminal, which costs £££ and no-one knows how big the potential market will be. Inertia is a powerful force, especially if there is no good reason to go elsewhere. There must be some good reasons why this feasibility study I've heard about said Lyneham was unsuitable.
Locals will put-up with a lot more from the military (logistical support for our brave troops in Afghanistan) than they would from civilians (creme de la creme of British society off to Ibiza).
The minute an airport is proposed I would expect to see massive protests against it, far more than for housing etc. The complaints would go on for years and years as people would have to put up with the noise for years and years - just look at Redlands airfield. As I said earlier Wiltshire council are a big player here and they don't care if Swindonians would like an airport. They care if the people of Wootton Bassett, Calne, Chippenham etc. are going to complain about aircraft noise and increased traffic.
If anyone really cares about the environment, re-using the site for aviation actually makes more sense than sticking up ticky-tack houses or seeing more air traffic and runways shoe-horned into some existing site.
Trouble is these existing airports are a known quanity, so less risk for the airlines and airport operators.
If a company like BAA came along wanting to develop Lyneham, I'd be a
lot less cynical. However, my fear is someone like our great mate Rikki will come along (which is why the 'holiday resort' plans bother me) set-up a company call AviationCity, get a load of money off Wiltshire council and get nowhere.
Feel free to call me cynical - maybe it's what comes from being a born and bred Swindonian.
