I was at the bar last night with a friend over from London and the topic of Gatwick Airport came up. In particular, the number of runways -- I understand that only one is in use for arrivals and departures but looking at the airfield there are indeed two parallel runways. I would imagine the reasons for using only the one have to do with noise restrictions imposed by local authorities around the airport -- I stand corrected in advance if I'm off the mark -- but does anyone know if and when both runways were in use? IIRC as part of the future expansion plan for the Southeast's airports (ie. Heathrow's 3rd runway and Stansted's second) a second runway was also mooted in the long-term for Gatwick itself. Would that be as simple as opening the existing rwy for traffic or something, er, more involved?

Anyway back to work for me. I'm thinking ahead to my trip next month to SFO and heavy a/c have been departing Schiphol over the centre of Amsterdam for the past couple days, so I thought hmm...

cheers