Gatwick Airport says it is committed to recovering long-haul connectivity back to pre-pandemic levels as it seeks permission to use its northern runway.
The Sussex airport – the world’s busiest operating with a single runway – is hoping for planning permission to bring its second auxiliary runway into routine use.
Stewart Wingate, chief executive of Gatwick, told this week’s Airlines 2023 conference in London that a development consent order is with the UK government.
The proposal is currently at an “examination stage” having been accepted which will take six months followed by a three-month period in which the planning inspectorate will put forward their proposals. After that the secretary of state will have a further three months to endorse the decision.
If all goes to plan the runway could be operational next year. Wingate said: “2024 is going to be a key year. Around the turn of next year we should have a very clear picture of the future of Gatwick Airport.”
Wingate told delegates that Gatwick is “thriving again” following Covid with some airlines back up to the capacity levels they were operating in 2019.
“The short-haul network is pretty much repaired,” he said. “In fact some of our airlines are at more than 100% of passenger that they were serving before the pandemic.
“The focus now is on rebuilding our long-haul. We have more than 50 long-haul destinations in sale but still some way to go to get back to the levels we were before the pandemic. But we are very committed to achieving that.”
Wingate said he has been working on the northern runway project since 2017 and that investment in the plans to expand Gatwick continued throughout the pandemic.
He said the airport requires “policy stability” from government to give it the confidence of making the investment in the facility to grow.
“What we also need is to work in partnership with the industry,” he said. “Over the next period the industry really needs to pull together, for example, on the decarbonisation agenda to ramp up SAF.”
Gatwick has made a commitment to accelerate achieving net zero for its scope one and two emissions by 2030, a decade ahead of its previous target.
Wingate welcomes recent improvements to public transport and road access to the airport including improvements to the M23 and M25, new trains and the extension of contactless Oyster rail payments. This week the airports’ rebuilt railway station opened.
