More Weekend Traffic OK’d for Farnborough Airport

The UK government has approved an increase in weekend movements at the London-area Farnborough Airport. On Thursday, TAG Aviation won its appeal against an earlier local government decision not to allow an increase from 2,500 to 5,000 movements during weekends and on public holidays. The ruling, made jointly by the Department of Transport and the Department of Communities and Local Government, came almost a full year after the end of a public inquiry into the issue. Importantly, the grounds for granting TAG’s appeal draw strongly on recent central government aviation policy that favors increased business aviation traffic at airports such as Farnborough. TAG believes that this could strengthen its case for having the overall annual limit of 28,000 movements increased. It now intends to start preparing the case for doing this with a new long-term master plan for the privately-owned airport that it wants to publish by the end of this year.