Welcome to heathrow

L ondon’s Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world. It handles over 350,000 international flights every year – about 41 million passengers. Around 54,000 people work at Heathrow, roughly the population of a country town.

Huge machines wash the airport’s three runways and clear away the oil left by jet engines. Burst tyres can cause a crash, so special trucks continuously check the runways and pick up any loose pieces of metal. Birds can cause crashes if they get pulled into the engines, and staff work day and night to keep them away from the runways. Their trucks have

loudspeakers which send out bird alarm calls and they also use guns with blank cartridges to frighten the birds away.

In the control tower, 150 air traffic controllers bring the planes in and send them off safely. As a plane comes in to land, it normally keeps a distance of five or six kilometres from the planes in front and behind, but in the case of large jumbo jets, the distance behind has to be 10 kilometres. The air turbulence behind these planes can send a small plane out of control.

Near the centre of the airport is the police station. It has a huge picture board of known world terrorists, 14 dogs that can smell drugs and 300 police officers.

There is an aircraft alert almost every day. This happens every time an aircraft lands with one engine shut down or if the pilot cannot lower the plane’s wheels. The emergency services can lay a carpet of foam on the runway in less than four minutes.

The Medical Centre has eight nurses and three doctors always on standby. The most common illness is heart attack. Every year about 30 people die in this way while travelling to or through Heathrow.

Because of the noise, only a few flights are permitted between midnight and six in the morning. So during the night Heathrow Airport has its most welcome visitor of all – silence.

Amazing facts … • Every year Heathrow handles over 57,000,000 items of baggage. • There are 9,200 baggage trolleys for passengers – more than at any other airport. • Airport’s cafes and bars serve over 23,500 cups of coffee and tea and 11,500 sandwiches every day. • Heathrow’s duty-free shops sell 500 million cigarettes every year. • For every 10 cm of snow falling on the airport, staff have to remove 74,000 tons of snow to keep the airport open. • Heathrow averages around 100 take-offs and landings every day – that’s about one per minute from 6 a.m. till midnight. 3,000,000 litres of aviation fuel are used every day. • 70 airlines use Heathrow. They fly direct to 214 destinations in 85 countries.

12 Work in pairs. Discuss the following questions.

• Have you ever flown on a plane or helicopter?

• When did you last go to an airport?

• Why did you go there?

• Which airport was it, and what was it like?

• Have you been to any other airports?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of flying compared to other kinds of transport?