A loopy idea or genius? Branson proposes hi-tech Heathrow fix
HIS aspiration to send sightseers into space may be unfulfilled so far, but Sir Richard Branson believes he has discovered a new way to help tourism take off back in Britain’s airports.
The entrepreneur has claimed to know the answer to London’s runway expansion dilemma – a system of highspeed “hyperloops” to ferry passengers between the capital’s airports.
Virgin Hyperloop One, a California start-up chaired by the billionaire, has been studying the possibility of a series of high-speed tubes between Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted which it says would allow passengers to travel between the airports in five minutes.
It says the hyperloop, a proposed transport system that involves futuristic pods travelling through low pressure tubes at speeds of up to 670mph, would effectively turn London’s three major airports into one “hub”. Rob Lloyd, Virgin Hyperloop One’s chief executive, said the plan could remove the need for a third runway at Heathrow.
“[We’re] thinking about how technology could make it a much different proposition than the third runway. You’d think of this as moving between terminals instead of moving between airports,” he said.
Mr Lloyd said the company’s technical advisory board, of researchers and infrastructure experts, had assessed hyperloops, and estimated it would take five minutes between Heathrow and Gatwick, and seven to Stansted.
Hyperloops were first proposed by Elon Musk, the Tesla and Spacex entrepreneur famous for his eccentric ideas, who envisaged a cheaper, faster and more energy efficient mode of transport than trains. Passenger pods would travel through tubes either buried underground, or overground on concrete stilts, with the sensation of travel similar to a plane taking off.
When Virgin Group invested in Hyperloop One last year, Sir Richard said it could mean a trip from London to Scotland taking as little as 50 minutes.
However, the idea has been mocked as the epitome of Silicon Valley bluesky thinking, with cost estimates already soaring above Musk’s predictions and engineers warning of potential safety risks. The only successful tests of the technology to date have been unmanned trials on Virgin Hyperloop One’s 500-metre track in the Nevada desert, which have reached a maximum speed of 240mph.
In December, a paper published by the Department for Transport said a hyperloop in the UK would be “at least two decades away”.