“Doing nothing is not an option”: that was what the last transport secretary but a dozen, Alistair Darling, told me on a visit to Gatwick airport in 2004. He was referring to the discussion about extra aviation capacity for the southeast of England.
Since then, a grand total of nothing has happened – except that Heathrow and Gatwick have become adept at extracting every last ounce of capacity from their ludicrously overloaded runways. They are, respectively, the busiest two-runway and single-runway airports in the world.
