And only slightly more (10km) than OSL is from downtown Oslo.

Excellent idea....no birds either, problem solved. ^

This would seem like a logical solution, but there are so many people with a "Not in my backyard, but must be local to me" opinion, I just can't see it happening - its not a personally suitable location for those that make the decisions.

So you'd be all for a two or three new super long runways on JER (15,000ft each should do it) and a high speed rail link to get to the UK? ;):D

Actually it could work for BAA to buy Blackbushe airfield (13 miles south) and demolish the area around it and buy up all the farmland and build maybe 2,3 or 4 4500 meter long runways and a huge terminal to go with it. Then link it up with Heathrow with a super fast monorail train system and create a six runway Heathrow.

Blackbushe could become Heathrow 2 or something and could house of BA and Virgins A380s to compete better with the rising threat of Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways at their vast desert hubs

Beardy ordered the paint for redoing the Eurostars. He was quite upset when he was told it wasn't going to happen.

Going back to the noise issue for a minute... I grew up in Reading, I suspect that our school break times were delibirately timed to coincide with Concorde going over - you couldn't properly hear what the person next to you was saying. Nowadays I live near Reading, noise wise I don't notice the smaller aircraft coming over but the 747s are an annoyance.

Assuming it could be done, expanding STN makes sense to me given that it could be accessed from the north without going through London if the appropriate links were built. This in turn would reduce congestion in London (and thus pollution) whilst creating new economic opportunities around the new transport links

On the whole Heathwick sounds like a better idea than Boris Island.

I love all these talks about "high speed" transport being built, this in a place where the final leg of the Eurostar took decades to build, longer in fact that the Channel Tunnel itself, a place where Crossrail is currently 35 years late and running, etc etc.

My last post was tongue in cheek you know. :p

As far as I can see, and I do know some people who work with this sort of thing, that STN is the only realistic long term solution. Everything else seems to be a short term patchwork that's going to leave us wondering what the hell to do 20-30 years later.

I'd say expand Heathrow with a another 2 runways. You don't need to touch the villages. Just build them over a couple of those reservoirs to the west of it. There's a hosepipe ban anyway, so we're not gonna need them... ;)

Its 15 years that the country will be grid locked. We need to do something now.

Think of the jobs that will be created too in these recessionary times. Lots of construction workers no doubt available in the SE now that the Olympic sites are largely complete.

I think most of those workers may have gone back to Poland by now. :)

NHT is 6 miles from Heathrow, with a lot of buildings between. How would you run them as a single airport (with taxi-ing from one to the other). Expanding LHR to the west would require dropping the M25 into a tunnel, but apart from that there's not a great deal out that way.

I dont know how safe a tunnel would be, I know Manchester has them under their runways. But if someone wanted to cause disruption then park a van in the tunnel etc.

you can park a van in the middle of a road as well