Airline passenger news and views

Following last December's disastrous performance by Heathrow due to cold weather, with 4,000 flights canceled, the British Airport Authority (BAA) is looking into use geothermal technology to heat up the airport runways.

The idea is quite simple: harvest the heat during the summer months, store it underground, and then use it in the winter to melt the ice formed in the asphalt and keep the planes in movement. Now we will have to see if the concept is so easy to implement at a massive scale as the BAA proposes.

Steven Morgan, BAA's capital projects director, told Building magazine: "We are working on a concept to capture geothermal energy from the surface of the tarmac, so energy without using the grid, during the summer, to then provide a heating capability so the stands don't freeze in the winter."

According to Morgan the cause of last year's problems, with the subsequent delays suffered by thousands of passengers, was the ice and not the snow.

"We would store the energy underground and use it to gently heat water that would then be run through pipes in freezing conditions to warm the stands, which are the slabs of concrete directly beneath the planes, to just above zero," explained Morgan about the way the plan should be carried out.

This initiative may be an answer to the strong accusations faced by Heathrow airport for being so easily put out of order. Transport secretary Philip Hammond ordered an immediate review at the time, the Winter Resilience Enquiry Report, which identified "a low state of preparedness" for snow that was forecast many days ahead and a lack of specialised equipment to clear it, and accused BAA of a failure in communication.

BAA had announced that it is developing a £50 million Heathrow resilience investment plan, that will allow Heathrow to implement all the recommendations of the Winter Resilience Enquiry Report, and which it will recommend to airlines and the Civil Aviation Authority.

The BAA project about geothermal technology is currently at a research level, with no available data yet of how much would it cost to be implemented.

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