Lakhs of passengers at Heathrow airport will face delays and cancellations over this weekend because George Bush has demanded that he lands his Air Force One.
Visit is expected to throw Heathrow schedules haywire
LONDON: Lakhs of passengers at Heathrow airport will face delays and cancellations over this weekend because George Bush has demanded that he lands his Air Force One at the commercial airport and not at a military base when he visits London. The world’s busiest airport will be thrown completely out of gear on Sunday when Bush arrives and again on Monday when he leaves. More than 1,80,000 passengers use Heathrow everyday where a flight lands or takes off practically every minute.
Security measures for the US president means that arrivals of commercial flights will be almost halved for almost an hour before his fleet of planes arrive. The number of flights allowed to land will be cut from 42 to 24 an hour. Departures from Heathrow will also be affected because planes arriving late will not be able to turn around quickly enough to meet the take off times.
Aviation experts predict the knock on affect of that one hour will last up to six hours and then the whole exercise will be repeated again when Bush leaves again. “No one knows why on earth Bush wants to land at Heathrow. It is not as if he is going to stay and look around. He will get straight into a helicopter and fly off to wherever it is in Britain he is going. It is totally unacceptable,” said an official at the airport who wished to remain anonymous.
Visiting London for 24-hours as part of his farewell tour, Bush will be meeting Prime Minister Gordon Brown and having tea with the Queen. Officials believe that Bush and his entourage could have landed at RAF base in Brize Norton in Oxfordshire or the vast US airbase at Lakenheath in Suffolk without disrupting commercial flights.
On Thursday, there were already delays after air space over Heathrow was cleared for two hours to allow a military cargo plane carrying the President’s armoured cars to land at nearby RAF Northolt. The British, unused to so much disruption to their lives due to VIP movements, are calling the arrangements ‘ridiculous’ and an ‘overkill’. British prime ministers and members of the royal family generally use RAF bases so as to avoid disrupting commercial flights and harassing the public. As Bush is not very popular with the British, who hold him responsible for the Iraq war, the weekend disruptions are even more galling to the public.
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