Oxford flies the Olympic torch for MENA visitors

Speaking to Arabian Aerospace at a pre EBACE Show media briefing, James Dillon-Godfray, London Oxford Airport’s business development director, said: “We’re just on the outside of the restricted zone, which means it’s inherently easier coming in here, than it will be at some of the airports that are within that zone. Places like Luton and Biggin Hill and Farnborough are all within the restricted zone where you have to file a flight plan within a certain notice period, and then wait for an official sanction to operate on that flight plan. Here, it will be unconstrained, other than the fact that all of the airports in the South East of the UK are going to be slot-constrained.  We will have a limited number of IFR slots per hour, but we have plenty of parking space here and I think because of the volumes of traffic that are likely to be coming through, we’re going to be able to take quite a number of jets that are going to find it extremely difficult to get in elsewhere.”

 

Following a £10m investment, with a further £5m still to be invested, the airport has recently completed work on 17,800m² of new high strength apron and has also resurfaced 5,000m² of established surfaces, doubling the parking capacity at the airport for aircraft weighing up to 50 tonnes.  The airport has also added up to 21% to its useable runway take-off distance, meaning it is now capable of Middle East flights with fully loaded Gulfstream or even BBJ aircraft.

 

 “The big change came about a month ago. We’ve had the same physical runway length for a number of decades, but what we’ve done is clear a number of obstacles from either side of the runway and on the approaches at either end. And that’s enabled us to increase the take off distances at Oxford to 5,223 ft (1,592m). The consequences of that are that we can now for the first time get chartered larger business jets out of here across the Atlantic, but also over to the Middle East. So that’s a fundamental change. Privately people have been doing that for many years, but for public transport or charter operations you can now get a handful of passengers and travel those 3,000-4,000nm distances out of Oxford.”

 

Dillon-Godfray says this is a major step forward for London Oxford Airport, providing Middle East operators travelling to the UK with a viable alternative to other South East airports such as Farnborough and Luton.

 

“The great benefit of Oxford is that it is relatively hassle-free. Compared to Luton, which is a commercial airport, we have very simple and very easy access. You can come through the gates and be running down the runway at Oxford in as little as six minutes. And vice versa as well, you can land your aircraft and be out of the front entrance of the airport in a similar period of time."

 

“In addition to that, we’re outside of the London Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA), which means airways access is arguably simpler than it is to those airports that are in the main London zone, which is the busiest airspace in Europe. In being able to avoid that zone, you can actually speed up an operation point to point by coming directly into here off the airways, without being held up in traffic in the London air space,” he added.

 

London Oxford Airport is located 40 miles north-west of London (55 miles from the centre of London), connected to the capital city by the M40 motorway, which Dillon-Godfray argues is statistically the least congested and the fastest motorway in the UK. The airport also boasts on-site helicopters, which can get visitors to London Heliport, in 22 minutes.

 

Dillon-Godfrey says he will be looking to meet Middle East flight planners at next month’s EBACE show in Geneva (stand 1642), in order to persuade them that Oxford is the place to come to for London 2012.

 

“Everybody in the United Kingdom is trying to capitalise on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we will be doing so too. We will be talking directly to a lot of the Middle East Operators but also the flight planning companies as well, to tell them about the merits of coming here.”