WILLIE WALSH (Letters, last week ) would have us believe the support of Emirates for an estuary airport is merely a cunning ploy by a competitor to delay Heathrow expansion and plunder market share. He fails to answer the main point that even with three runways (one of which will be too short for long haul) Heathrow will be uncompetitive against the six-runway hub being built in Dubai.

Runways aside, Dubai will operate 24/7 whereas the severe social and environmental blight Heathrow’s location inherently brings requires mitigation, resulting in loss of capacity, particularly at night.

Runway alternation and the Cranford agreement do not make the same headlines as the third runway, but it is no less scandalous that these noise mitigations, introduced to soften the blight of past expansion, are to be sacrificed in the name of future expansion. Richard Slade Windsor, Berkshire

Terminal decline The European hubs Walsh mentions are successful because the respective governments had the foresight to build them from new, away from existing inadequate airports. London is the only major European city with an inadequate hub that requires most aircraft to take off and land over heavily populated areas and right across its city.

London can never hope to achieve anything like Dubai’s “24hour, six-runway airport” at Heathrow. The only answer is to plan for the future and build a Dubai (or Hong Kong) replica in the Thames estuary and take a leap ahead of the European competitors. Alan Thompson Richmond, southwest London

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