Mayor Boris Johnson calls for possible sixth London airport

The Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is calling for a study into the possibility of constructing a sixth airport to ease the congestion of London air traffic.

The Mayor, elected to office in May of this year, stated in a newspaper column that serious consideration should be given to construction of a new airport to the east of London.

“It is … ever more urgent that we investigate the possibility of a long-term solution, in the form of a new and more eco-friendly international airport,” the mayor wrote in a Daily Telegraph column.

The mayor said it was unlikely that a third Heathrow runway would be built and that Gatwick, London’s second-largest airport, was “full to bursting.” Heathrow Airport is the world’s busiest, handling over 68 million passengers annually.

He added that more detail on the new airport proposal would be forthcoming.

No spokesman for the Mayor was immediately available for comment on the proposal.

Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted airports are all operated by BAA, which is currently the subject of an investigation by the Competition Commission into whether it operates as a monopoly and should be broken up.

Thank you to www.reuters.com for the above quotes, for more information on this story please visit their website.