101 YEARS OLD AND STILL RUNS AWAY FROM RUNWAYS...

DROPPING in on my old friend Prof Norvus Breakdown, holder of the Ikea Chair in Contemporary Lifestyle at the University of North Brent, I was alarmed to find him grovelling around on the floor of his study, moving toy aeroplanes around.

“Beachcomber!” he exclaimed as I entered. “Just the man! I really need your help. It’s my new job advising the Government on the third runway at Heathrow business. I simply can’t get my head around the problem.”

I asking him to explain and he took one toy plane in each hand and rolled them along the ground towards each other until they crashed together.

“You see?” he explained. “This is a vital aspect of the whole thing that seems not to have even been raised before Parliament took its decision: the direction of travel. If you have two runways, they can be just like two lanes on a motorway or the two sides of a road: one can carry vehicles going in one direction while the other is for those going the opposite way. Having three lanes, or three runways, however, doesn’t work. You would have to have two going one way and the other going in the opposite direction.

“I don’t know how they do things at present but it seems to me that the sensible way is to have one runway for landings and another for take-offs. A plane, after all, tends to hit the ground at speed on landing at one end of a runway, then gradually slows down until it finally stops at the other end. Then after disgorging its passengers, it is ideally placed to taxi over to the other parallel runway, ready for takeoff in the reverse direction.

“You can’t operate three runways in that manner without having twice as many planes taking off as landing, or vice versa. In the first case, we quickly find the whole place cluttered up with planes; in the second we find ourselves running out of planes pretty quickly. And as I just showed, you can’t have a two-way runway without a high risk of planes crashing into each other.”

“I see the problem,” I said. “Do you think this may be the reason Mr Boris Johnson has raised objections to the third runway? He’s a bright chap and must have thought of it, though I can’t recall his ever spelling it out quite as clearly as you have just done.”

“My own feeling,” the professor said in a low and quiet tone, “is that Mr Johnson knows exactly what the problem is and realises that in fact we will need four runways to equalise the departures and arrivals. He’s just pretending to oppose the third runway so he can distance himself from the turmoil when it is built and then save the nation by proposing a fourth.”

“And when we have four runways, two of them can be used for flights to and from the Americas while the other two are for European flights,” I said. “So then the planes coming from the west can land in one direction, while those from the east land in the other and no planes have to turn in mid air.”

“And they all take off in the right direction,” the professor added. I hadn’t though of that. That’s brilliant.” “Clever chap, that Boris,” I said. “Absolutely,” said the Prof and we left it at that.