Bristol Airport is one of the three airfields that once served the city of Bristol. Whitchurch was the civil airfield, Lulsgate Bottom was an RAF station, mainly used for flying training, and Filton was the home of the Bristol Aeroplane Company (later BAC, BAe, and now Airbus).
The story of how RAF Lulsgate, situated eight miles outside the city and on top of a hill, came to be the present-day Bristol Airport is tortuous. It involved the closure of Whitchurch, as the area around it became built up in the 1950s.
Protracted argument followed in the early 1990s about the choice between Filton, which had rail and motorway connections as well as one of the longest runways in the country, and Lulsgate. However, Filton had extremely articulate neighbours in the district of North Bristol, and so Lulsgate it was.
The development of Bristol Airport also involved the sale of the municipal shareholding in Lulsgate in the late 1990s, which enabled investment to match the initial growth period of low-cost airlines. From around 2 million passengers per year at the millennium, the airport has grown in capacity to handle over 10 million passengers this year.
The mid-1990s were also the time when the ‘County that Used to Be Avon’ (fondly referred to as CUBA) ‘decomposed’ into its current four component parts: Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and BANES – the catchy acronym for Bath and North East Somerset.
This left ‘Bristol’ airport sitting in the green belt in North Somerset, accessed by a single carriageway road (the A38) and a collection of country lanes. Bristol City Council and other stakeholders thereupon demonstrated what really determined apathy could achieve when it comes to the transport infrastructure that is required for a substantial airport.
Looking ahead
Having just this year achieved 10 million passengers per annum (PPA), the airport has understandably been looking ahead and the plan to handle 12 million PPA was recently approved. Consultation is now underway to increase that total to 15 million PPA. It is by far the most dominant airport in the south west of England, with a catchment area that includes South Wales, and has generated the slogan ‘Wales’s busiest Airport’.
It is worth pausing at this point to reflect on how well the local infrastructure currently copes with 10 million PPA, when planning is in hand to cater for a 50% increase.
On the plus side, the South Bristol Link Road has been built to allow better connections between the M5 from the north and the A38 access to the airport. On the minus side, the Bristol Clean Air Zone prevents non-compliant vehicles from using the route from the M5 via the Portway to the South Bristol Link Road. Those vehicles are therefore pushed back onto the country lanes.
The A38 remains a two-lane road both north and south of the airport and there is little prospect of it being turned into a dual carriageway where it passes between the Barrow Tanks reservoirs which provide much of Bristol’s water. Discussion of a metro system with a branch to the airport only happens in the weeks immediately preceding the election of the mayor and is then quietly forgotten.
Public transport consists entirely of buses, but there is no rapid transit system and there is massive demand for car parking. Much of the land within the airfield perimeter has planning approval for use as parking, but there is a ready market for car parking without planning approval in many of the surrounding fields.
This results in a game rather like ‘splat the rat’, in which North Somerset Council identifies an unauthorised car park and issues an enforcement notice, the car park then promptly moves to another field, allowing the whole process to start again. Roads in local villages are also used, with cars dumped for weeks at a time.
For those collecting friends or for taxi drivers (other than the franchised airport taxis), there is an hour’s free waiting at the car park on the south side of the airport. However, cursory inspection of any lay-by in the vicinity will find litter of all kinds and, in the absence of any toilets, human waste as well.
Maximising returns
The cost of those cheap flights we all enjoy is that the airport has to adopt a business model that squeezes a return out of the peripheral services: car parking, the retail lounge, and the chance to enjoy a few pre-flight beers at four am. Not to be forgotten is the franchised airport taxi service – where else can you pay over £50 for a three-mile return journey?
There is a cap on the number of night flights. This may once have been intended to cater for flights arriving late due to operational delays. However, scheduling of out-of-hours arrivals now seems commonplace so that passengers from late arrivals mix with those for early departures on a round-the-clock basis.
At 6am, a squadron of EasyJet and Ryanair aircraft takes off, launched as rapidly as the ground handling and security facilities can cope with the numbers. A two-hour check-in therefore means that the morning rush hour begins at around 4am, when trains and buses are few and far between.
It is perhaps curious that one of the major investors in Bristol airport (and other airports), the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is now choosing to sell its shares. Could it be that this investor sees the days of easy growth have gone and that further development is going to meet increasing push-back and require proportionately greater investment? The days of airports regarding everything outside the perimeter as someone else’s problem are already numbered – and should be over.
Growth vs the environment
And then there are environmental considerations. Newer aircraft are undoubtedly more fuel efficient than the last generation, but we should only expect incremental improvement and not a step change to new fuel sources for a good many years.
Conversely new, more fuel-efficient aircraft like the Airbus 321XLR (Xtra Long Range) will create opportunities for League Division Two airports like Bristol, which will be able to offer new routes that have previously required large aircraft and long runways. Why travel to Heathrow to fly transatlantic when Bristol may offer a viable service? More growth at Bristol.
One obvious target should be those journeys that could equally well be served by rail. Some years ago, a colleague and I attended a meeting in Paris and one of us returned by rail while the other flew. We reached home within ten minutes of each other. Train services to other destinations on mainland Europe have been discussed for decades. If we are serious about climate change, these services should be made to happen.
Even with the user-unfriendly border arrangements around the Eurostar services, it should be possible to make rail a more attractive option than air travel for a broader range of destinations. However, it may take a miracle to persuade those taking internal UK flights to resort to the ‘Cinderella’ of the rail network, Cross Country trains, with its crowded 20-year-old diesel sets.
The consultation: ignoring the bigger picture
Many of the issues in the consultation about the Airport’s immediate growth tend to focus on the changes that will happen within the perimeter of the airport. They concentrate on the detail and are based on the assumption that unrestricted growth is a good thing. But an increase of this significance needs to be considered in a much wider context.
Is uncontained growth in air travel an appropriate objective? Are there viable alternative modes of transport, both to the ultimate destination and to and from the airport? And do the combined local authorities have the will, the co-ordination, and the muscle to work with the airport to deliver a metro-link that will get significant volumes of traffic off the roads? These are perhaps the issues that we should be addressing, rather than whether there should be 150 metres more runway.
When it comes to responding to consultations, never let a carefully crafted question constrain you from expressing your real views.
We want to hear your views. Please send any comments to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
