Gatwick Airport to be sold, modernized

by Sean McLachlan on

This week’s announcement by the British Airports Authority that it will sell London’s Gatwick Airport has everyone wondering about the future of the city’s second busiest hub.

The BAA, owned by the Spanish group Ferrovial, sold Gatwick for £1.5 billion ($2.49 billion) to Global Infrastructure Partners, owned by Credit Suisse and General Electric. The deal comes after the UK government decided the BAA had a near monopoly and ordered it to sell Gatwick and Stansted, both serving London, as well as either Glasgow or Edinburgh airports.

BAA also owns Heathrow, London’s busiest airport, and is expected to use some of the money for that airport’s infrastructure, but most of it will be go towards reducing a staggering pile of debt amounting to almost £10 billion ($16.6 billion).

What this means for travelers is not yet clear. The new owners have stated they plan to modernize Gatwick, and have expressed interest in expanding the north terminal and adding a second runway. Gatwick is the world’s busiest single-runway airport, serving more than 32 million passengers last year. An agreement with local residents has stopped any additional runways until 2019, but now that there’s a new company in the cockpit, that may change. A new runway could enable Gatwick to serve up to 80 million passengers a year, more than Heathrow. The situation will become clearer in early December when Global Infrastructure Partners officially takes over.

UK Airports to face penalties when they screw up your trip

by Scott Carmichael on

The UK has a bit of a history when it comes to airports getting in the way of your vacation plans.

London Heathrow airport is where I’ve spent many a night waiting for air traffic to get back to normal while they attempt to fix whatever was interfering with my plans.

Last year was undoubtedly the worst period in the history of UK airport screw ups – the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5 was nothing short of a monumental disaster.

At one point, the airport operator was telling passengers to just stay home until the problems were fixed. And even when things got slightly better, the airport was losing 1000 bags a day.

Another great example of an airport messing things up occurred when Gatwick saw a little snow, and decided to shut down for the morning, stranding thousands of passengers, and forcing planes to divert to neighboring airports.

A new government proposal could help improve things – it plans to give the UK Civil Aviation Authority more power to issue penalties to BAA, who operate most of the airports. The penalties will be in the form of rebates for the airlines who were impacted. Of course, this may not always benefit passengers, as the proposal does not force airlines to split their penalty proceeds with passengers.

Still, it is a step in the right direction, and if the penalties are stiff enough, it might help the offending airports realize they can’t always get away with being incompetent.

British Airport Authority told to sell Gatwick, Stansted and Edinburgh airports

by Josh Lew on

England’s British Airports Authority (BAA) was told by the country’s Competition Committee that it has to sell Gatwick, Stansted, and Edinburgh airports. The watchdog group has pointed to a lack of competition as the reason for advising the sales. “Under separate ownership, the airport operators including BAA, will have a much greater incentive to be far more responsive to their customers, both airlines and passengers.”

BAA was bought by Spanish company Ferrovial two years ago. The Competition Committee’s criticism of BAA might look like a bid to bring ownership back to the U.K. However, that is not likely to happen. BAA put Gatwick on the market in August. The top bidders thus far are German and Australian companies. Virgin Atlantic is also trying to organize a consortium of investors to make a bid.

The Scottish airports and Stansted remain in BAA’s hands for now. The organization responded to the watchdog’s report by saying that there was no compelling evidence proving that the airports, especially Stansted, should be sold.

Gatwick airport gets some snow – shuts down for the morning

by Scott Carmichael on

Gatwick airport was taken by surprise yesterday morning when an unexpected flurry passed over the area. Even though just a fraction of an inch of snow actually landed on the tarmac, the airport decided it would be best to shut down all flight operations.

Of course, when over 100 flights are either heading towards Gatwick or getting ready to depart, you can understand that the mess was quite considerable.

Gatwick is in the regrettable situation of only having a single runway for all flight operations, despite being the second busiest airport in the UK, and the busiest single runway airport in the world.

It took airport operators 5 hours to get the ice and snow cleared, and allow airlines to arrive or depart again.

By then the damage had already been done. Major carriers had already diverted flights to neighbouring airports, including airlines who don’t even have operations at those airports. I briefly spoke to someone at Ghana International Airlines who saw their Accra flight end up in London Stansted instead of London Gatwick.

Flightstats now has the flight listed as having to reposition to Gatwick tomorrow morning, which is probably a better situation than having to load 200 passengers and crew on a bus.

None of this helps improve the image of BAA, the UK’s airport operating authority. The agency is already under fire, and was recently ordered to pay airlines back for failing to provide adequate service.

(Thanks to Chris for the tip, via Telegraph.co.uk)