Been to St. Pancras International lately? Canary Wharf underground? Travelled on a refurbished First Great Western HST? There’s a lot of good stuff around if you just open your eyes, and more coming – I’m looking forward to the East London Line opening.

Adding to Adam’s comments, the airport’s the wrong side of London (forcing a large percentage of its users to travel along already congested transport routes like the M25, which would require disruptive upgrades), a huge area of west London would lose its major employer and turn into a ghost town, you’ve got to move that workforce 40 miles and provide it with public services, in a flood-prone area. Then there’s the hi-tech industries along the M4/M3 corridors which will be really pleased to lose one of the main reasons for locating there in the first place. Every time I look at the idea I see more giant objections.

If you really need more space, why not use RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, which isn’t that much further out, is on the right side of London, is near a motorway, two main railway lines and nicely positioned near a probable route for a high-speed rail line which would put the centres of London *and* Birmingham about 45 minutes away. You could build a lot of that HSL for the money saved over Boris Airport.

There’s nothing wrong with Heathrow operationally that can’t be solved by reducing the number of aircraft movements – that’s what causes the overcrowding and delays. I last used it last week, dropping the missus and kid off for a flight up north – no traffic delays, flight on time both ways.

Finally, Heathrow isn’t even 70 years old. Just because the ‘tiger’ economies do something doesn’t mean we should do something completely different and stupid that bears a passing resemblance until you examine it with your eyes open.

1.Kent County Concil don’t want it
2.The Conservative Party don’t want it
3. The Labour government doesn’t want it
4.There’s no money behind it
5. Boris has no jurisdiction in Kent

That’s without mentioning the environmental objections, the lack of sufficient transport infrastructure and the ship full of explosives lying where Boris wants to build it.

Why can’t we do that? Why does everything we do have to be so shoddy and ‘make do’?

Fog isn’t the problem it was, of course – Heathrow gets pretty foggy sometimes.

Several groups working towards the various plans for airports in the area claim that birds are easily manageable, but even a fairly conservative study performed while planning for Cliffe found that there would be three times the danger of damaging bird strikes than at any existing airport in the UK, even if extremely aggressive tactics were to be used. There are just as many birds on Sheppey as on Grain, and more shipping traffic passing by.

There is no real airport solution, sadly. Luton is too foggy to be a major airport, Gatwick too far away and with the same infrastructure problems you mention, and the expansion of Stansted is too unpopular and would require rebuilding from scratch (despite it probably being the best option otherwise).

It seems there is no better option at the moment than sticking with Heathrow.