HEATED RUNWAYS ?WOULD COST LESS THEN ?5MILLION?
Water-filled pipes buried just below the surface absorb the heat of the summer sun on the runway.
The heat is stored and released through the pipes when temperatures drop below 3C, preventing the runway from icing up. London-based ICAX has used the Interseasonal Heat Transfers in a ?300,000 trial to keep a road at Toddington motorway service station, Bedfordshire, ice-free for two winters.
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Finance director Edward Thompson said the renewable energy could have kept Heathrow open. He said: ?Using this would quite simply mean that ice would not form on the ?runways or the areas where planes are parked. That would mean that planes could continue to fly.?
He estimated that the cost of installing the system on the 200 parking areas and the runway would be between ?3million and ?5million.
But aviation expert David Learmount, of Flight International, said: ?No airport in the world has heated runways. They will never happen.
?They will cost too much and just imagine how many flights would have to be cancelled while the runway was dug up, especially at ?airports like Gatwick with only one runway.?
