Originally Posted by CrazyJ82

The thing of it is that if Heathrow and Heathrow expansion are as economically valuable as boosters claim, the market should be able to bear high landing fees and other user charges that would pay for an expansion without recourse to taxpayer funding. (And before another economist comes along mentioning externalities, I'm not convinced that's a strong argument in this case.)

Walsh I'm sure would love to have the benefits of more capacity at LHR although he probably suspects that the benefit would not be valuable enough for him to recoup the cost if that cost were 100% passed on to users. He's probably right about that, to the extent there are other underutilized airports around London that could capture even more O/D traffic than LCCs already have if LHR's fees/fares become too high. So you can't fault him for "asking" for taxpayer support as he's implicitly doing with his complaint about high user fees. That's not to say the politicians should be gullible enough to fall for it.