The Southend airport runway that’s fringed by gardens

Plane Talk: Janet Marchant’s misery is a consequence of aviation paralysis

Janet Marchant is mightily annoyed about Charlie. That is the name Southend airport gives to the taxiway that runs past the bottom of her well-kept garden in Wells Avenue, SS2 6XL.

“I’ve lived with the airport for many, many years,” she told me on a blustery afternoon in southeast Essex. “But there’s never been a taxiway at the bottom of my garden with aircraft sitting there for up to 20 minutes at a time.”

Well, I checked out Charlie. It seems that the taxiway has been there more or less since the dawn of time, or at least 1947 – when Southend airport officially opened (though it had been a military airfield since 1914).

Since then, whenever the wind blows from the north or east, it has been used by planes heading for the southwest end of the runway to take off.

What is different about 2019 compared with, say, 1953, when Janet’s grandfather moved to Wells Avenue, is the scale of the operation at Southend.

When Freddie Laker was cutting his aviation teeth at the Essex airport, he launched a “roll-on, fly off” air ferry for cars.

“We cut the nose off the Douglas DC-4 and put it up above the fuselage like a 747, and we could carry five cars and 22 passengers,” the aviation entrepreneur told me.

But flying with a car to France or Belgium was a very expensive, very niche product that did little to trouble the Wells Avenue residents’ quiet enjoyment of their gardens.

Other operations that came and went include a shuttle service to Rochester in Kent, 20 miles across the Thames Estuary, and a bus-air-bus link between London and Brussels; the flight component a hop of under 100 miles from Southend to Ostend.

But since the Stobart Group bought Southend and pumped more than £100m into making it look like a real airport, the departure board is much busier and bolder.

On Friday, 58 flights landed or took off: easyJet commenced proceedings at 6.30am with a departure to Faro in Portugal, and ended them with the arrival from Malaga at 11pm. In between, Air Malta arrived and departed from its home island, while Ryanair shuttled to Palma and Dublin. That’s roughly one flight every quarter-hour.

Janet Marchant and her neighbours weren’t expecting that. And the opportunity to land from Spain late at night and be tucked up in bed 15 minutes later is not much consolation. So I sympathise with the resentful residents who have discovered that the XL in their postcode appears to stand for the size of the jets that are disrupting their lives.

But I also sympathise with the 2.5 million passengers who will be meandering past Ms Marchant’s magnolias this year.

A decade ago, when Stobart Air bought the airport and renamed it “London Southend”, I would have scoffed at the prospect of it ever being connected to Corfu and Cluj. But it is now a fast track to the Ionian islands and Transylvania.

What the ambitious airport owners see as success, and Ms Marchant and her neighbour deplore, is down to two things: investment in a railway station which makes Southend better connected to London than, say, Luton airport. And, more importantly, aviation paralysis.

At the same time as the sale of Southend was going through, the last Labour government was busily approving a third runway at Heathrow.

By now, according to that particular plan, Europe’s busiest airport would be handling over 100 million people this year. I have checked, and there are still only two runways at Heathrow.

With Brexit devouring all the political energy, you might be forgiven for thinking that the plans are gathering dust in Whitehall along with all the previous expansion projects. But a Heathrow spokesperson told me: “After years of political debate, we are getting on with delivering this once-in-a-generation project.

“We look forward to our next major delivery milestone – statutory consultation on the preferred master plan this June – ahead of opening the third runway in 2026.”

Making the bold assumption that the timetable is correct, that implies six more years of increased demand in the world capital of aviation. It may be that the travelling public in London and southeast England collectively decides to fly less, or the government increases taxes to dampen demand for aviation.

But history suggests that the 160 million passengers who will fly in or out of the London area this year will rise to 200 million by 2025.

Some of the increase will be absorbed by Heathrow; a few additional operations can be squeezed in, and a rise in the average passenger load per plane is likely. Gatwick plans to press its standby runway into service. Stansted and Luton have off-peak slots available.

But for maximum flexibility and fleet optimisation, the only way is Southend. Which, I agree, is not the news that Janet Marchant and her neighbours need.