Roland Perry wrote:
In message
-septe
mber.org, at 21:33:10 on Mon, 23 Jan 2017, Recliner
remarked:

In effect, by closing the busier of the two taxiways, you'd be reducing the
effective capacity by about 24 gates. At least this slashing of capacity
should dramatically reduce the queues at Immigration!

How busy is it? I don't recall ever seeing a plane using it. Certainly
not the nose-to-tail queue you imagine it to be.

Again, you give the impression of never having used Gatwick South.

I've flown from it several times. The last occasion the baggage handling
system had broken down, and everything was delayed by an hour or two.

Of course that taxiway is used by planes using any of the 20 or so gates
for which it provides the best route to/from the takeoff and landing
runway. If you'd used the South terminal, you'd know that. And when when
you're waiting in North pier 6, you don't see any planes (eg, Virgin or
Norwegian) from the South terminal passing under the bridge.

There's something wrong with the arithmetic. You said that merging the
taxi-ways would reduce capacity by 24, and I think we agreed that the
total in that bit of the airport was 30, so where's the 6 come from?

Your enormous new cul-de-sac could work acceptable well with half a dozen
gates, but not with more. So 24 of the 30 in the blighted zone would be
lost. That's roughly the capacity of the North terminal (minus its
satellite).

Perhaps you've not noticed, but the modern approach to airport design is to
eliminate cul-de-sacs. One way to do so is to have island satellite
terminals which can be accessed from all sides, with the passenger
connections not obstructing taxiways: they're normally underground, but are
sometimes by high bridge or bus. That way, you get a free flow of taxiing
aircraft, which are never bottled in. Heathrow's original terminals did it
the bad old way; T5 did it the better, modern way. T2 will be like T5, once
the remaining bits of T1 are demolished.

Gatwick North gets it right (and Gatwick South almost does), but you want
to ruin both terminals by adopting a particularly egregious version of
1950s airport design.