Recent developments in aviation have seriously undermined proposals to expand Southend’s Airport.

The 53,300 air movements, based on two million passengers a year, is lifted from the Jacobs report’s prediction for 2020.

However, Jacobs hedged this forecast with a number of caveats.

The first was that overall passenger numbers would expand as predicted in the 2003 White Paper, rising from 2003 at the rate they were in 2002 at the beginning of the financial bubble.

They have not.

Passenger numbers fell by an average of 14 per cent in the last quarter of 2008 and the decline has continued in 2009.

The second was that there would be a shortage of airport facilities caused by this rise. With the Government committed to capping aircraft emissions at 2005 levels, the airlines promising to cut them by 50 per cent by 2050 and the EU seeking to replace all domestic flights with fast rail, this is not going to happen.

The number of short range flights, the only sort Southend, even with this modest extension, could accommodate, will diminish in the long term, not increase. The runway will still be 335 metres shorter than Luton and 944 metres shorter than Stansted, its major competitors.

Finally, 63 per cent of Southend’s traffic would be summer holiday passengers.

Airports are expensive to run and cannot make a profit with 63 per cent of their business coming in a few months of the year.

EasyJet quit East Midlands airport because it saw no prospect of making profits on this basis.

Burstin Travel reached the same conclusion at Southend years ago.

The Stobart Group is a road transport business diversifying into rail. The A13, A127 and the Southend Victoria to Liverpool Street line are virtually empty between 11pm and 5am.

Plenty of time to move containers from the new port on the Thames to Southend, repack them in to single destination loads and move them out by HGV and diesel freight train the next night.

The magic word “airport”

gives them a base rent-free. A few passenger charter flights and some night freight flights should meet the terms of the lease in the short term. These will continue to be subsidised by council tax as they are now. The airport pays no ground rent on the land it occupies and the rents on business premises that would otherwise accrue to the council go to the airport.

The Biggles Brigade will be disappointed. They think they will get an airport.

In reality they will end up with a road and rail transport depot. Is that what the councils and residents want in their back yard?

B J Free
Eastwoodbury Lane
Southend