Not building third runway would be 'huge missed opportunity', warns Heathrow boss
Thomas Woldbye wants an answer, and the polite edge in "it would be good to know" tells you everything about how infrastructure projects stall these days. A runway is a fifty-year bet on the future, but the people making the call are working on electoral cycles. That mismatch does something strange to public life.
I think the third runway has become a lightning rod for bigger panics about growth and climate. We want to fly, we want the economy to hum, and we want to breathe cleaner air, and those wants pull in opposite directions. Woldbye frames it as a missed opportunity, and he has a point that dithering carries its own cost. But treating the environmental risk as a minor footnote would be the real failure. I would want to hear exactly what the prime minister said, because the difference between "we will look at it" and "we are in" is pretty much the whole story.
The odd part is how this keeps returning, like a runway that refuses to leave the flight path of British politics. Sooner or later someone has to land the plane on a decision instead of just circling the airport.