LETTER - Will anyone vote Lib Dem again over Southampton Airport?

Does Ed Davey know that carbon emissions from UK aviation have doubled in the last 25 years and industry experts predict that they will continue to rise for the foreseeable future?

He appears to believe that we are on the way to "green zero emission flights" and says "the technologies are coming on far more quickly than people had expected".

This may be the case but no experts working in this field believe that zero emission flights will be a reality within the timescale governments have to control carbon emissions and prevent catastrophic global warming.

Nor have they any idea where the sustainable aviation fuel will come from without the production itself having a huge carbon footprint (as with biofuels, for example).

Successful so-called "zero emission" flights have been made on an experimental basis but these have been by smaller lighter aircraft only and if Southampton Airport authorities were genuine in their intention to pursue a green future they would not be demanding a longer runway to facilitate the use of larger and heavier planes, the least likely ever to be "zero emission".

Ed Davey also manages somehow to make an increase in passenger numbers seem like a decrease.

The fact that the cap on passenger numbers in the revised airport plan is lower than the cap in the original plan does not prevent it still being an increase on current (pre-Covid) numbers.

Safety is also something of a red-herring as only safe flights are allowed anyway.

Ed Davey implies that an extended runway would make flights safer whereas the reality is that it will allow larger, heavier aeroplanes which would not be allowed on the existing runway.

It would appear that Ed Davey is living in the same cloud-cuckoo-land that Boris Johnson occupies.

Lindsi Bluemel

Southampton