Regional Airports in Decline

All over the BBC news this morning is the story about the serious decline in passenger numbers from regional airports. It's being dressed up by calling into question the so called 'hidden charges' that regional airports are introducing. The fact is that there are too many airports in Britain for the size of the country. We get away with it in a time of rampant passenger demand but this is only going to get worse over the next year or so. We can expect more airlines to fail and more services to be cut. It's all about economics.

What's more surprising is that no one has linked what's going on to the proposed sale of some of the BAA's airports. There's a lot more to come on this story in the next few months.

The independent Tells a Porky?

According to Martin Hickman in the Independent.

"Air travel is declining for the first time in almost 20 years, The Independent on Sunday discloses today. Airline failures, harder economic times and a dismal airport experience have caused a sharp downturn in the number of travellers boarding planes at British airports."

I know he's quoting Independent on Sunday figures, but I doubt it's true. In 2001 the volume of passengers using the BAA's UK airports dropped by 1.6 % against 2000. I'm sure the other UK airports will not have picked up the slack.

The fact is that the individual airport statistics hide a multitude of aberrations, both temporary and more fundamental. They should take a look at how the figures play-out at the low cost airline hubs to show how significant the effect on that sector of the market is; so far this year Stansted is almost 5% down. As I've said regularly the bubble for cheap travel is set to burst, but let's at least be truthful in the reporting.

XL Go X Rated

This just in from a pal in the airline business...

The latest XL related casualty is the closing this morning of....wait for it...Throb Holidays.

Throb specialises in holidays for gay persons...nothing like using a discrete name! At least the passengers had protection (so to speak) through the ATOL scheme.

Throb had of course paid all their money to XL, and now cannot recover those funds. This is the problem with tour operator to tour operator sales. Passenger's remain protected through the bonding scheme, but the tour operator who has paid their money (in this case to XL Leisure, as opposed to the airline) loses it and simply becomes a creditor.

You couldn't make it up....

The Cycle of Aviation

The airline business is cyclical, always has been always will be. It's why airlines like Court Line went down in the 70s, Laker in the 80s, Air Europe in 1991… and many others in between.

According to what I've been reading on the web the head of XL believes there are dark forces at work, but since the airline industry was deregulated this is what you get because aircraft manufacturers need to sell more and more aircraft. It causes over capacity, which needs a growing or at the very least a stable-ish market to survive. As soon as things start to turn down then the inevitable happens...airlines and tour operators go bust - those that are vertically integrated are especially vulnerable.

The fact is that forward bookings are now the biggest issue. Airlines have survived the summer because advance bookings were not affected by the loss of confidence coupled with the realities of the credit crunch. This is not now the case; people are not booking travel like they were. Watch over the coming weeks as we start to get a rash of advertising from easyjet, Ryanair et al as they attempt to buy market share.

The Skirl o' the Pipes

Richard Thomson over at Scots and Independent has an interesting post all about his weekend with the Huntly Pipe Band. It reminded me of just one of many incidents I was involved in with a pipe band - back when I had a proper job, although quite how proper job and working with a pipe band appear in the same sentence I'm not so sure. British Caledonian Airways was, because of its Scottish heritage, in love with all things tartan, which of course meant that the female staff uniforms were just about the best there has ever been. The site of a girl standing at the top of the aircraft steps, ‘somewhere in Africa’, in her crisp white blouse and her kilt has been known to make many a grown up ex-pat go weak at the knees. Anyway I digress, because what BCAL also had was its very own Pipe Band. At the drop of a hat, or the start of a new route to some far flung corner of the world, the Pipers were dispatched to stir the hearts of everyone to hopefully make them buy more tickets.

When a new route was started the Pipe Band became a focal point of the airlines activities in the new destination city. The Pipe band were clever, they always learned a new tune with particular links to that city for playing at events and so on around the new route start up. When BCAL began flying to Houston they played The Yellow Rose of Texas while walking along the main street of the downtown area. Next thing you know they are all over the TV with local stations oooo-ing and ahhhhh-ing over this wonderful new Scottish/British airline.

When BCAL began flying to Atlanta I was asked to ‘keep an eye on them’ during their time in the city while the more important BCAL employees got on with the job of schmoozing the local big-wigs and the guests on the inaugural service, which included the late Labour Party leader John Smith. A huge reception was planned in the ballroom of the Omni hotel, so the band and I went through what it was they were going to do. Most of the talk surrounded how they were gong to walk around the balcony area before descending the steps of the ballroom to properly entertain the one thousand or so guests. We didn’t talk about what songs they were going to play. That was my big mistake.

That night, with the great and the good of Atlanta, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, assembled in the ballroom, it came time for the band to enter. I was standing next to BCAL's chairman, Adam Thomson. First we hear the muffled strains of the pipes, they are playing Scotland the Brave as the enter the top level of the room. As they got to the staircase and started to descend to the room in which we were standing the Chairman turned to me and said.
“Well done Richard, aren’t they marvelous.”
As I was about to reply the pipers and drums segued into the special song they had learned especially for Atlanta.
“Oh my God.” Was all I could say.
“What? What is it?” says a worried Adam Thomson.
“This song, you know what it is don’t you?" I asked him
"No, No, what is it?
"It’s Marching Through Georgia, the song the Union troops whistled and sang as they burnt Atlanta during the American Civil War.”
I thought he was going to have a seizure. I was lucky to survive that one, because somehow it became all my fault.

The SNP are Delusional

The SNP are getting like some tired old broken record and they've only been in government for a year. The news that Zoom the Scottish airline has gone belly up with debts of, apparently, £50 + million was inevitable as the old, what goes up must come down theory. With just seven aircraft and a handful of routes the business model just doesn't stack up. It might just work in a booming economy but it has no chance in he current one. Falling demand, rapidly rising costs, fighting off high oil prices for months and an over-riding climate of difficulty mean that forward bookings would have been sliding for months.

However, when asked for a comment all the SNP government can say is "This is one more symptom of the damage being inflicted by soaring fuel prices, which is why the UK government must use its own energy tax windfall to help the economy." They use every opportunity to have a pop. If they seriously think that this wouldn't have happened in an independent Scotland under the SNP they are delusional.

The BAA is Not That Badly Broke

I've been a critic of the BAA and I remain so in some aspects of what they do. However, having read the Competition Commission's report I find myself agreeing with the BAA that it is flawed. Take this one statement. "In Scotland, BAA has until recently been noticeably slow to develop new routes at Glasgow and Edinburgh, whilst at Aberdeen, its investment plans are regarded as unambitious despite relatively high levels of profitability. At Southampton, it has shown a reluctance to respond to its customers’ demands." It's not the BAA's job to develop new routes, that's a job for the airlines. Of course they have a part to play, but it's a small part. For Scotland's size and with all the other factors air travel is well developed and will not be magically bettered by a bit of airport competition.

The Competition Commission's report reads like a thesis and they need a sharp dose of reality. Many of the problems that exist are about capacity, government, planning and CAA regulations; all this is against a background of demand for air travel. While it's easy to talk about these things it's much harder to fix them and splitting up the airports is not a panacea, nor much of a solution. I remain unconvinced that it will help and once again I'm minded to think that none of this may have happened if BAA had not been bought by a Spanish company.

Scotland's Air Travel Market is in Trouble

The Scottish air travel market is going through lean times. Today's figures from the BAA show that Glasgow and Edinburgh's combined passenger numbers were down 2.3% for the month of July. For the year to date the total number of passengers using the two airports is down by 1.4%. It's quite likely by the year end that they will be down by around 2% on 2007 and even showing a decline on 2006. Things are much worse at Glasgow, but Edinburgh seems to be slipping into decline as well.

This tells you two things; VisitScotland are not cutting the mustard and all the euphoric talk about a rapidly expanding scottish travel market, that was being mentioned within the last year, is tosh. Edinburgh is going to fail to even reach it's lower passenger forecasts for the year 2013 - none of which is good news for the economy. The decline in July is not restricted to Scotland's airports. London's airports are 1.6% down, whereas Scotland's three BAA airports (the third is Aberdeen) are down by 2.3%.

Anyone want to buy...

....a used airport? But it's not necessarily going cheap. There's news today that the Spanish owned BAA could be forced to sell off either Glasgow or Edinburgh airports by the Competition Commission. It's reported in today's Scotsman, but comments by the public on their web site are as usual wide of the reality mark. Airport landing fees are about the only way that airports can make themselves more attractive to an airline, after you remove the geographical factor. If it were as simple as lower landing prices then all flights would leave from Prestwick where they have lower fees than at either Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Even before the rising fuel prices landing fees were a relatively small percentage of an airline’s operating costs. Even if either one of the two main Scottish airports halved its landing fees then it’s not necessarily a big boost for the airlines – other than those already using the airport. Of course competition is such that if one airport did it, then the other would follow suit and there would be a short-term gain for the airlines but probably very little gain for the passenger.

Operators like BAA derive the lions share of their operating revenues from airport shopping, concessions and parking, so on the face of it they could afford to drop their landing fees somewhat. However, the splitting up of BAA (lowland) Scotland will not necessarily be the bonanza for passengers that some are predicting. There won’t suddenly be a long line of airlines wanting to fly from either one of the airports, even with lower landing fees, because the problem is passenger demand, not a falsely created competitive environment.

While the current high price of fuel may be a temporary blip there are many other factors that go towards making air travel less of a buoyant business moving forward. Rampant growth is just not going to happen for the Scottish airports. Already BAA Edinburgh is well below their lowest anticipated growth targets for 2013 that were made back in 2004/5. Their low forecast was 11.9 million passengers in five years time; their high was 13.7 million. The likely figure is in the range of 10.2 million to 10.9 million.

And one thing’s for sure. This competition will do little to improve the ‘passenger experience’. The pressures on security, check-in and all the other ‘on the ground’ aspects of flying will still be there and still be far less pleasant than we would all like. Downward pressure on costs in all these areas does nothing to improve things and this will not change. Our expectations as passengers far outweigh the airlines ability to deliver a product that can ever be achieved at the kind of fares we all would like.

The Battle of Britain

I’m a couple of days late here….I’ve been busy! However, we should remember those incredible times when so many young men, on both sides, were killed during the summer of 1940.

Thursday was the 68th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Britain. It began on 10 July on that everyone agrees. However, there has been debate ever since amongst historians as to how long it lasted and how many phases of battle there were. Most agree that the first stage of the campaign was very much a - testing the enemy phase - by the Luftwaffe. By attacking ships in the channel, mounting small raids on the North of England and sending over reconnaissance aircraft the Germans were able to probe and test the preparedness of the RAF fighters; it also allowed them to partially test the RAF’s tactics. For the Germans there was the bonus of every RAF fighter lost was one less with which Britain could defend herself come the main attacks. The attacks on Merchant Navy convoys in the channel were helping to rob Britain of valuable food and materials supplies.

10 July 1940 was very cloudy, with intermittent showers, and shortly before 2 p.m. a large German formation showed up on the radar; it was just west of Calais heading towards the Kent coast. There were close to 80 aircraft in all, including 24 Dornier 17s and the rest being a fighter escort of around 30 Me.110s and a similar number of Me.109s. Initially it was mostly Hurricanes that were scrambled from Manston, Biggin Hill and Croydon, along with Spitfires of 74 Squadron from Hornchurch; later on around half a dozen Spitfires were also sent up from Kenley.

While the Hurricanes of 111 Squadron from Croydon attacked the Dorniers, who themselves were busy attacking the convey, the remaining fighters engaged the escorting fighters. With so many aircraft the sky quickly became a mass of vapor trails and soon aircraft were going down. Later that day a force of around 70 bombers attacked both Swansea and Falmouth. During the night bombs were dropped in a number of locations in the south, and on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. RAF losses for the day amounted to eight aircraft, with two pilots killed.
 The 
Luftwaffe lost 20, including badly damaged, aircraft, and lost 23 aircrew either killed or missing as well as ten more wounded; one of the ships in the convey was sunk. That was not how German Radio reported the day’s events.

“Our bombers yesterday achieved effective successes on an airfield in South Eastern England, and on harbour installations on the South and South¬ West Coast, and upon armament works. Especially at the munitions depot near Pem¬broke, and in the harbours of Plymouth and Swansea heavy explosions and large fires were observed. The oil storage tanks at Pembroke and Portland were also set ablaze. Further, in the course of an attack on a convoy in the Channel, ten enemy fighter 'planes were shot down in air battle. During the air battle yesterday 35 enemy 'planes and one barrage balloon were shot down. Seven of our own 'planes are missing.”

German Radio 11 July 1940

Not so much a case of this is my truth; tell me yours - as our propaganda’s better than your propaganda.

Mail Wars - Stornoway v Campbelltown

In 1927 American aviator, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. flew solo from New York to Paris in 33 hours and 30 minutes in a single engine monoplane and became a legend overnight. Later he hit the headlines when one of his children was found murdered, he tried to keep America out of the Second World War and was accused of being a Nazi sympathiser and anti-Semitic.

After Lindbergh others, including Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Johnson paved the way. Somewhat against the norm for the time many women attempted to conquer the skies above the Atlantic ocean. Amongst those who died were Miss Ruth Elder (she declared that when she landed in Paris she would be “dressed to kill both man and mannequin”), Princess Lowenstein, Mrs. F.W. Grayson, Mrs. Beryl Hart (both Americans) and ironically the English millionaires the Hon Elsie Mackay (she was the twenty something daughter of Lord Inchcape the Chairman of P&O).

While these intrepid fliers were the pioneers newly formed American, British and European airlines were pursuing the goal of commercial transatlantic flights, but not at first with a view to carrying passengers. The mail was their mission. Before the Second World War business relied upon getting the mail through and while British airlines were preoccupied with the Empire and mail, Americans and Europeans were no less myopic.

Not everyone who saw opportunities in aviation seemed to make much, if any, sense. Take Rene Fonck, a ‘French air ace’, who was obsessed with the idea of a series of floating islands that would be staging posts, every 325 miles, at which sea planes would refuel. In Scotland, the mayors of Stornoway (airport right) and Campbelltown competed to become the eastern end of the transatlantic mail route. How different would life have been for these communities if technology hadn’t overtaken them? The German’s were busy catapulting aircraft off ships in an attempt to speed up the crossing of the Atlantic by boat and then plane. Not that Britain was left behind in the eccentric ideas department. In 1937 two aircraft were built, they took off with the smaller one attached to a larger aircraft that would then ‘release’ its ‘passenger’ that would fly the rest of the way across the Atlantic. Against all the odds the idea actually worked in practice, and while it did make a few transatlantic crossings with mail events overtook its development.

Finally in 1938, after years of discussion and corporate posturing by American and European airlines the first commercial mail flight took place; it was made using a seaplane.

The Really Wild Blue Yonder

We're heading for some turbulent times in the aviation industry. Yesterday's news that the Monopolies Commission is thinking of breaking up the control of the UK's major airports was hailed by everyone of great news - well not the BAA. On the surface of course it looks like a given and there will be great times ahead as airports compete to attract airlines to their airport. Simple really, except not quite so simple when you look at the economics of the whole thing and here in Scotland the proximity of Edinburgh and Glasgow both competing for what is only a relatively small pot. Somehow or another airlines, notably Virgin, think that it will instantly lower their costs and the passenger experience will be improved. Again it's all a bit to simplistic. Airports do not compete in the same way as ordinary businesses and never will. It's all become a bit of a mess, resulting from the governments privatisation of the BAA years ago and its sale to the Spanish company a couple of years ago. We've made a real rod for out national aviation back.

There's an added problem looming, that of very tricky times for the airline business. The shares of both easyJet and Ryanair continue to slide. This morning easyjet dropped 5% to 288 pence per share in early trading, that's down from 448 ( a drop of 36%) since February; just remember they were at over 700 in June 2007. Ryanair are also in all sorts of trouble. They are at €2.63 today, down from €3.50 in February (a drop of 25%), back in 2005 they were at €6.77. The fact is that they cannot buck the inevitable - meaning rising oil prices and the squeeze of discretionary spending. Unlike the traditional carriers who have a greater proportion of business travel and carry cargo, carriers like easyJet and Ryanair have very little space for manoeuvre. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some new route expansion from Ryanair in Scotland shelved and neither would I be surprised to see some aircraft being sat on the ground as the pressures on costs keep soaring

Scotland Targeted By British Airways...I Don't Think So.

The furore over BA's failings with the new terminal 5 has inevitably given Alex Salmond the chance to complain that once again Scotland is being treated unfairly. He was on the BBC news last night wagging on about it and saying Scotland was fed up. He said passengers were getting "fed up". Andy Willox, of the Federation of Small Business Scotland, added his voice to the complaints: "It is an open secret that flights to and from Scotland are the first to be scrapped in order to clear the backlog and handle more lucrative international flights." So did Liz Cameron, chief executive of Scottish Chambers of Commerce: "It seems once again that services to and from Scotland are suffering disproportionately."

The simple fact is that flights to Glasgow and Edinburgh are amongst BA's most frequent services and from an airline point of view it is easier to cancel flights on routes where you operate a higher frequency. That way it's possible to combine loads onto other services. The first thing that airline schedulers do is to look at is the booked loads and then try and figure how to cause the minimum disruption - for both passengers and the airline. To suggest that this is some anti-Scottish thing is plain daft.

The First Minister used the opportunity to once again call for more direct flights from Scotland. "Filtering everything through Heathrow leaves us extremely vulnerable, we need more direct flights and of course we should have a fast train service north to south." It's as though he lives in an economic vacuum. No matter how much he wants an independent Scotland it will not automatically create demand for enough passengers to bring about a surge in direct services. Quite a few flights that have started up in the last three years with the Scottish governments route start up grants have ceased for lack of passengers. In the economic realities of aviation it's all about profit, not politics.

The Forth Bridge in 1939

This amazing photograph was taken on
16th October 1939, the Second World War arrived in Britain by way of Scotland and more precisely Edinburgh when nine Junkers Ju-88 attacked the Rosyth Naval Dockyard, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth; it was the first attack on Britain by the Luftwaffe.

Around 2.30 p.m. the German aircraft were sighted, and Spitfires of 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, Auxiliary Air Force, were scrambled from RAF Turnhouse (the site of modern day Edinburgh airport) to intercept the raiders. Additionally Spitfires from 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron, based at RAF Drem located to the east of Edinburgh, in East Lothian, were on patrol at 20,000 feet.

At around 14.35 hours, the Luftwaffe bombers began their attack and were met with anti-aircraft fire. The Spitfires of 603 Squadron that had taken off from Turnhouse were the first to engage the Junkers and soon shot down one of the bombers. The Spitfires from 602 Squadron were then ordered into the attack and they shot down another. During the action the Royal Navy suffered 3 officers and 13 ratings killed and a further 44 wounded on board the light cruisers, HMS Southampton and Edinburgh, and the destroyer HMS Mohawk. There were also two people injured on the ground in Edinburgh by falling shell cases.

Meet Me in St. Louis

One of the few Berwickshire bloggers (we happy band of brothers), Huttonian, has reminded me of how tricky it could be dealing with the (in)famous British Caledonian Airways pipers. In the 70's when British Caledonian started flying to St. Louis naturally the pipe band was there to remind everyone of our Scottish ancestry. After the first flight had departed from the city all the BCAL staff, along with the pipe band and the crew that had brought the plane from London went to the nearby Ramada Inn, where the crew were staying, for a party in celebration of the BCAL Airport Manager’s birthday. The party was going along really well, until the Police appeared.

“Who’s in charge here?” I guess that will be me I thought looking around the room, although I’m not to sure what I was in charge of at this point.
“Me. Probably.”
“Well you’ll need to come with us, we have got some of your pipe band in custody along with three of your flight attendants. They have been playing their bagpipes in the hotel car park.” Said the officer.
Phew I thought is that all.
“And, your three flight attendants have been roller skating around the car park with them – topless!”
It took all my powers of persuasion to convince them not to press charges.

There Will Be Trouble Ahead

The naivety of Alistair Darling's plans to make aviation more ‘green’ is a triumph of politics over practicalities. The plan is to replace the duty paid on tickets by passengers with a charge based on the type of aircraft the airline uses and the distance it flies. He thinks it will make airlines more efficient by encouraging them to buy newer aircraft. He clearly has little or no understanding of the way the industry works.

It will not reduce aviation's CO2 emissions or enable the industry to grow ‘sustainably’ – that is a conflicting dream that plays well in political circles but has no bearing on reality. Most of the aircraft that are now flying, will be doing so for many years to come (the length of time aircraft are ‘written down’ in their owners accounts makes this a certainty). They might not be flying with the airlines that now own them but with some other airline that buys them and either starts up or expands their own business; not necessarily in Europe but elsewhere in the word. The aircraft manufacturing industry is all about growth and so are the airlines themselves. New and more efficient aircraft like the A380 will just replace less efficient 747s, but someone will be interested in buying and operating that less efficient aircraft

Of course the charges levied on the airlines will just be passed on to the passenger via the ticket prices. And all that this is going to do is to allow the likes of easyJet and Ryanair to advertise yet lower and more crazy lead-in prices (the supermarket mentality)/ This in turn will have the effect of making things even more competitive and all this is against a background of an industry that is about to see passenger demand being squeezed as the disposable income of British travelers, in particular, continues to fall..

I predict a bloody price war, and financial losses ahead. Will there be a major causality in all this? Most definitely.

Another Trip Up To The Moral High Ground

Now the Tories have come up with a cunning plan to reduce short haul flights. VAT would be levied on fuel for domestic flights for the first time and airlines would be forced to give over airport slots to long-haul trips. All flights would be subject to a separate per-flight tax based on the amount of CO2 generated, replacing the air passenger duty and shifting the burden from passengers to airlines. The proposals also include plans for a moratorium on airport expansion pending attempts to free capacity at existing airports by restricting short-haul flights and forcing travellers to switch to high speed trains.

They say that because a fifth of journeys are to destinations in Europe and the UK that are served by high speed trains it would reduce the need for a third runway. All this comes from the quality of Life group headed by John Gummer and the environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith.

They've clearly lost the plot and are jumping on the bandwagon. First of all this will force up ticket prices when you shift the 'burden' to the airlines because funnily enough they'll pass it on to the passengers. I know there's the expansion of the Eurostar upcoming but what high speed trains in the UK? Unless I'm very much mistaken, and I'm a regular traveller to London on the Edinburgh line, it is pretty full a lot of the time and there doesn't seem to be that much spare capacity. Many of the passengers using domestic flights are connecting to long haul flights at Heathrow and it is naive to think that it will 'force' airlines to increase in any significant way long haul flights from non-London airports.

At some point or another politicians are going to realise that this 'push of the green vote' is going to start to backfire. Yet again we in Britain seem to be climbing to the top of the moral high ground while others are just laughing at us. Added to which it is people who are travelling on plans at their own free will. If they are to stop flying so much it either has to be through price or legislation that limits capacity. Capacity legislation will likely be challenged in the European courts and similarly any moves to increase taxes or landing fees will not just affect British airlines but also European airlines - again fodder for the courts.

We either have to be convinced that by not flying so much we will save the planet or we will have to be forced not to fly domestically so much by the government restricting flights. For me all other bets are off. Oh yes, and if Scotland gains independence it will not be a domestic flight.

UPDATE

If anyone doubts the value of air travel to the UK then they would so well to check THIS on the Department of Transport's web site. The Quality of Life's simplistic view of how air transport and airlines function does not auger well.

Flying the Atlantic

In the 1920s and 30s the race to be develop transatlantic passenger flights exercised many minds. Not that everyone who saw opportunities in aviation seemed to be able to come up with sensible and workable ideas

Take Rene Fonck, a ‘French air ace’, who was obsessed with the idea of a series of floating islands that would be staging posts, every 325 miles, at which sea planes would refuel. In Scotland, the mayors of Stornaway and Campbelltown competed to become the eastern end of the transatlantic mail route. How different would life have been for these communities if technology hadn’t overtaken them?

The German’s were busy catapulting aircraft off ships in an attempt to speed up the crossing of the Atlantic by boat and then plane. Not that Britain was left behind in the eccentric ideas department. In 1937 two aircraft were built, they took off with the smaller one attached to a larger aircraft that would then ‘release’ its ‘passenger’ that would fly the rest of the way across the Atlantic. Against all the odds the idea actually worked in practice, and while it did make a few transatlantic crossings with mail events overtook its development.

The End of Life as We Know It?

There's an article in today's Observer entitled 'Heathrow devalues the price of happiness.' It discusses how people's lives are 'blighted' by airport noise, and specifically aircraft noise.

Dutch economists looked at people living on the flight paths into Amsterdam airport. They found that they weren’t compensated for the noise by cheaper house prices, because Amsterdam, like most British cities, doesn’t have an efficient property market that allows its residents to make neat trade-offs. They calculated that the cost in misery from aircraft noise was about £1.60 per flight. Start a meter running in every house on an urban flight path and you quickly reach enormous figures.

In other words, people living near British airports could sue. Going to the courts may seem a fanciful prospect. But no one has ever accused lawyers of being slow to find new ways of drumming up business, and last week Chicago University's Law School held the world's first conference on the legal implications of the new research on happiness. Everyone agreed they were enormous.

BAA and the airlines seem like over mighty subjects beyond the control of government and customers. But if the happiness economists are right, they may soon be cut down to size by colossal claims for compensation. It couldn't happen to nicer people.

There's a huge numbers of issues at play here, not least the continuation of life as we know it. Clearly the lawyers can see a payday looming, the likes of which they've not had wind of since Human Rights Legislation was first mooted.

But two things strike me. Is it just people who live near Heathrow, or any other airport, that moved there after it was established that will be in line for a pay out? Failing that is there a cut off time - you have had to live there since say 1980? I also love the way that the writer just sees the BAA and the airlines as the problem - the villain in the piece. Is it not us that want to travel? Does he travel? Does his family travel? Is his food flown here so that he can eat? Does his iPod or whatever other gizmo or consumer electronic or FedEx packet magic itself to Britain like a 'beam me up Scotty' moment from Star Trek?

Media Scaremongering & MPs Naivety

According to the Daily Mail this morning. "Pressure grew today for urgent changes to protect airport check in queues from terrorist bombers. The all-party Commons transport select committee has called for queuing passengers to be moved through to airside more quickly - two weeks after the Evening Standard revealed fears that people waiting at airports are a prime target for extremists - and raised alarms about the number of passengers breaching carry-on luggage restrictions."

Have we gone completely daft? The logistics of all this are just incredibly complicated and will do nothing but make the 'passenger experience' even worse. Trying to move vast numbers of people through airports at the best of times is a logistical tightrope. Added to which are we really going to have our lives blighted by bowing down to terrorism in such a way? Our media is getting to the point of absurdity with their pronouncements. The doom and gloom approach is depressing people, already depressed by the 'summer weather', and this type of thing is not helpful.

Life will become intolerable unless we stop this scare mongering. There is no such thing as 100% security and there has to be a balance between the risk and life continuing in a way that allows our economy to flourish and our state of mind to be maintained. This committee of MPs is doing us a disservice with their naive approach and at the same time it's acting exactly as the terrorists want.