Turning London's Stations into Airports

Your plans should at least rely on the required technology actually existing.
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[@TheTimmynatoRex]

I remember Jay Foreman talking about a ridiculous proposal to build a circular airport runway on top of Kings Cross station.

[@coyotelong4349]

Yes and that aerodromes in the early 1910s wouldn’t allow anyone to be a member without a bushy enough mustache

[@CaymanIslandsCatWalks]

Found and explained or mustard has done a video on circular airports I thinkkkkk

[@danieldronzek8616]

That's what I thought about when this vid appeared in my rec.

[@emjackson2289]

@@coyotelong4349, but I ask you: How much mahogany can one fit into ones kite for a flight around the South?!

[@thomasburke2683]

Was it a spiral runway?

[@HesterClapp]

I've had an idea: why don't we make the taxi planes more efficient, by reducing the need for lift and using a metal guideway, since they're always making the same journey, and save on fuel by using electricity!

[@kidmohair8151]

I think I've some experimental things like that around. don't the metal guides get rusty though? maybe they could be put indoors or something...

[@liamtahaney713]

This actually happened in brussels!! The sight of thr first station in the country, a few hundred meters to the west of the current north station was host to the heliport where you could catch a helicopter. I still walk past helihavenlaan every working day on the way back to the station, wishing my train to Antwerp was a helicopter ride instead. Okay maybe i dont wish that. But its fun to imagine.

[@simonwinter8839]

Hot air balloons taking off from London eh? They could take off from Westminster pier with MPs providing the necessary hot air !!

[@Keithbarber]

Very well observed

[@neilbain8736]

Someone had to say it!

[@Keithbarber]

@@neilbain8736 an amusing *STATEMENT **_OF FACT_*

[@Ghauster]

I believe here in the States. Washington DC could launch at least 30 an hour.

[@simonwinter8839]

@@Ghauster We can't Trump that !!

[@tarnmonath]

That was a cracking shot of Kings Cross from above. ❤

[@caw25sha]

Something people forget today is that everyone involved in this plan would have seen aircraft develop from small and fragile wood and fabric contraptions to metal jets in just a few decades. It would have been reasonable to assume progress and innovation would continue at the same pace, with large, quiet vertical take off airliners the inevitable next step, probably by the end of the 1950s. Instead current airliners are conceptually the same as the Comet and 707 from 60 or 70 years ago.

[@watchmakersp9935]

Good points but by 1960s and 1970s Brituian was financially hard pressed.

[@emjackson2289]

Well, consider this: One of the very most recognisable helicopters to this day, certainly for the lay-person with no interest whatsoever in helicopters is what, was, c. 1965-66, the Boeing-Vertol CH47 Chinook and whilst they were on the news only a little less than the Bell UH1 Iroquois aka "Huey" during the War in Vietnam, British Airways - so about as far away from the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division as its possible to get - was operating the civilian versions by either the late 1970s & certainly the very early 1980s. So whilst the one survivor of the three I think it was was plodding around East Falkland in 1982 carrying muddy Para's and Marine's there was some BA helicopters carrying sharp-suited city types around London before a trip on Concorde to NYC.

[@caw25sha]

@@emjackson2289 Not exactly a viable alternative to all the Boeings and Airbuses which use Heathrow etc. every day, and not even a viable alternative to the Piccadilly and Elizabeth Lines.

[@JelMain]

@@emjackson2289 Well, the final sniper scenes at the end of Platoon were actually filmed in the derelict storehouses at the west end of what's now London City Airport.

[@karlosh9286]

I guess it's possible to argue that cars, motorcycles, lorries, trains and buses are pretty much conceptually similar to the same vehicle type from back quite some time ago ! Yes, they've all got better, but they are also still quite similar !

[@kevelliott]

As someone who has spent some time around airfields, I am frankly amazed that the concept even got onto paper. The amount of space needed for air operations is many times greater than the area of any main line railway station, goods yard and all - even by 1943 standards. Add to that the need for separate runways to deal with changes of wind direction, each runway to have an undershoot and an overshoot.... And of course, no high structures for about half a mile in each direction. No. Just no.

[@hb1338]

A Chinook helicopter can carry around 80 paratroopers standing up. A train can carry around ten times that number, at less than one tenth of the cost per hour (one hundredth of the cost per passenger). The prospect of the numbers ever being favourable is zero.

[@camenbert5837]

Do paratroopers often travel by train?

[@atraindriver]

@@camenbert5837 Commandos do, but they're usually off-duty when doing so.

[@grahammcdonald3650]

As well as my nerdy obsession with rail things I also am quite (more) nerdy about aircraft related things. So big double thumbs up from me here. Cheers Jago you are the anorak to my broken glasses

[@kevelliott]

Same for me!

[@emjackson2289]

The Frank Pick to your Frank Whittle

[@barrygower6733]

I used the Cromwell Road air terminal for a trip to Soviet Central Asia back in the 70s. Your flight was called in the terminal and you took the designated airport bus that also carried your checked-in luggage. The guarantee was that if you were on the bus, you were in the plane even if road traffic delayed arrival at Heathrow. For many years, airlines also had check-in facilities at Victoria railway station with your luggage loaded on the Gatwick Express. Back then, airlines tried to make journeys easier for passengers rather than the maelstrom encountered today.

[@hb1338]

The delays caused by late running buses and the extremely long check-in times made necessary by the remote location of the terminal were what killed it. The problem with all remote check-ins is handling the baggage in an efficient and timely manner.

[@chegeny]

Nice. Thank you, Jago. The past was so optimistic, with everything efficient and just so. Whereas, a Harrier blasting coal dust on Londoners feels satisfyingly accurate.

[@atraindriver]

In 1943 they had to look to the future. The alternative was looking at all the bombsites...

[@brick6347]

Kind of reminds me of how the top of the Empire State Building in NYC was supposed to be a mooring mast for airships so you could fly right into the heart of the city. For some inexplicable reason after the Hindenburg disaster the residents of NYC were rather opposed to having millions of cubic feet of flammable hydrogen hovering over the city centre so the idea was dropped. I dare say it might be an even tougher sell these days.

[@triviabuff5682]

I think that there was a scheduled helicopter service between JFK and a helipad atop the Pan Am building in Manhattan.

[@eattherich9215]

The reason it failed was because the promoter of the scheme couldn't get the airship to line up with the docking platform. In the end, a bundle of newspapers was dropped from the craft and the idea was dropped.

[@Sasha-1313]

@@triviabuff5682 There was indeed, for a few years in the mid-1960s. During that time, my family lived in an apartment that faced the Pan Am building, so I could lie in bed and watch the helicopters landing.

[@jimjolly4560]

​@@Sasha-1313As seen in the 1978 Superman movie!

[@Sasha-1313]

@@jimjolly4560 Literally the only bit I remember from that film was Lex Luthor’s girlfriend (or whatever) saying “Lex, my mother lives in Hackensack” which caused me to laugh for about five straight minutes, all by myself in the cinema, because by that time, which was several years after the film’s release, my family had moved to a town very near Hackensack, and I had moved to the UK, where I was apparently the only person who’d ever heard of Hackensack, entirely reasonably.

[@brianfretwell3886]

And now when they think about bringing freight into London by train and having electric lorries for local distribution they have no yards for the trains to go into!!

[@philipgibbard304]

Jago, your mention of an air terminal in central London reminds me of the West London Terminal which was located on Cromwell Road, in Kensington in the late 1950s to early 70s. It used to be possible to check-in to BEA flights there and then take special buses to what is now Heathrow. The early buses were specially built grey and cream vehicles, but were replaced later by special Routemasters which hauled luggage trailers. We used to see them frequently driving back and forth along the Great West Road.

[@jimthorne304]

Indeed! The W. London air terminal rated a mention in a Flanders and Swann review; Michael Flanders said that flying was safer than trying to cross the road - 'mind you, I've long ago given up trying to do this where I live with all the airport buses; I think the drivers have been given instructions to keep the statistics favourable'.

[@enclosingthefield]

Jago does mention it. It is not 'roughly' where Sainsburys is now, it is exactly there, the office block was refurbished and turned into flats in the 1980s.

[@Spanderson99]

Vancouver, British Columbia has the closest thing I’ve seen to this concept IRL. The seaplane terminal is just across from the old Waterfront Station, and offers scheduled regional flights to Victoria harbour and other coastal destinations in BC. All you need is a bit of water and a dock, and you have your Canadian airport!

[@tbjtbj7930]

Many great cities are also ports, and so the pre-war airliners were mostly flying boats. WWII left lots of large airfields everywhere for free, and the flying boats (designed for luxury services) couldn't compete and disappeared.

[@coastaku1954]

I wouldn't say all of Canada, I'm from Toronto and we don't have that, we are from this century and have actual airports, unless we're talking about Parry Sound which still has a Seaplane port

[@AndreiTupolev]

There still is a reasonably central London heliport on the Thames, Battersea Heliport, not far from Clapham Junction, so that too was not exactly a failed concept

[@gdwnet]

There is also vanguard heliport near docklands. To fly out of either (or into) is not cheap.

[@heli-crewhgs5285]

@@gdwnetIt’s actually called Skyports London Heliport, and is located on the SW corner of the Isles of Dogs, on Heliroute H4.

[@gdwnet]

@@heli-crewhgs5285Thanks for that, I've always known it as vanguard.

[@hb1338]

Extremely expensive and very low capacity. It will never be capable of mass transport.

[@loddude5706]

I see Blimps, entering & leaving the tube system via overground stations, to then serenely follow the slight vacuum induced by their waiting passenger's expectant applause. It's now 1922, my name is Elon Gates & I'm here to stretch your imagination : )

[@hb1338]

.. and lower your bank balance.

[@loddude5706]

@@hb1338 Oh dear, a life packed with instant negatives perchance?

[@RogersRamblings]

The notion brings a whole new meaning to the late 1970s LT advertising slogan, "Fly the Tube". 🤣

[@coyotelong4349]

Ah yes, the Rotodyne. A cool craft that I would never have known about if not for Mustard’s channel ✈️

[@johnjephcote7636]

I saw her at Farnborough Airshow. I loved it and it would have been the only rotorcraft (not a helicopter) that I would have wanted to fly in. The government withdrew support (as usual) even though the Canadians wanted a larger version. I later saw the pieces in a scrap lorry having gone up Scots Hill past my old Rickmansworth Grammar School.

[@oc2phish07]

I built an Airfix model of this when I was about 12 years old back in the early 1960s.

[@mrb.5610]

Somehow seems a better idea than the American Osprey ....

[@tbjtbj7930]

Further proof, if any were needed, that Rickmansworth is the centre of the world. @@johnjephcote7636

[@unclenogbad1509]

@@oc2phish07 You got there ahead of me - same here, though probably a bit younger. It was one my first 'big' kits, and had to save up for it.

[@tbjtbj7930]

Video on why building airports in the middle of London is madness. Concludes with footage of an airport in the middle of London.

[@hb1338]

"middle of London" - hmm. City airport was built in a large derelict area of what used to be the port. It does however highlight the main problem of the idea - woefully insufficient capacity.

[@drzander3378]

The early planners weren’t completely short of the mark in their anticipation of demand for an airport within London. They just got the location wrong. One was eventually built as London City Airport in the late ‘80s. It has been serving international and domestic flights since then and has been connected to the DLR since 2005.

[@MrSmith1984]

Even City Airport is kind of pointless now that the Elizabeth Line is up & running. Hence why it wouldn't be a bad thing to close down that particular airport.

[@xander1052]

@@MrSmith1984 I mean, gate space at heathrow still is at a premium so the third airport of london still has a point to exist.

[@MrSmith1984]

@@xander1052 There are actually 5-6 Airports in the London Area. What really needs to happen is that Heathrow gets it's 3rd Runway in the Short-Term... before a New Thames Estuary Airport is built to replace Heathrow & Gatwick (City Airport would likely have to close under those circumstances).

[@hb1338]

The problem with LCY (London City) is its' severe lack of capacity. The runway is too short and too narrow, and the approach is difficult (steep), which severely limits which aircraft can operate there. Demand outstrips capacity by about 5 to 1, which places extra strain on Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead .

[@hb1338]

@@MrSmith1984 Rubbish. London City transports passengers to and from Europe, especially those who have business in central London and the City. It is far more convenient than struggling in to the centre of London from any other airport. The Elizabeth Line serves completely different groups of passengers.

[@SouthPaw1805]

There was also the Imperial Airways Terminal, which had a direct link to Platform 19 at Victoria, which operated from 1939 to 1980. The building is now home to the National Audit Office, and was one of the buildings taking part in London Open House this year, though was only open on the second Saturday (i.e. 16th September.)

[@acharper6964]

Back in the 60s there was a proposal to build a huge shopping centre (we would now call this a 'mall') on the outskirts of Leicester. The proposal included a monorail link to the city centre and a helicopter 'station' at the shopping centre. Neither the monorail nor the helicopter station was built, but one of the largest Tesco superstores was.

[@neilscotter5191]

I'm not sure if they still do it but back in the 70's my mum got a helicopter from Newark Airport in New Jersey to JFK Airport in New York, she got a great view of Manhatten.

[@MartintheTinman]

Only the elite do nowadays

[@raymondmuench3266]

It was still around in the ‘80’s at a reasonable cost. Loved it.

[@hb1338]

@@raymondmuench3266 I spent six months in the early 1990s commuting weekly to Newark. The service had gone by then, more's the pity - the bus into NYC was a miserable ride.

[@highpath4776]

wouldnt it be better now to turn all the airports into railway stations - quite frankly HS1 should have run Liverpool John Lennon- Manchester Airport (with tram etc to Manchester suburbs for the connections), Birmingham Airport (ditto) Branch to Luton with onward cross country to Stanstead with an underground terminus under London City Airport - with extension maybe to Manston under the Thames. Main route to LHR with Local Trains Elizabeth Line for Central London (Split as HEX to PAD and EL to Straford etc. Onward to Gatwick - Fast train to Croydon for South London and Fast extension to Brighton, with possibilty to 2nd Channel Crossing if we ever talk to the French again. HS3 could run Newquay-Cardiff-Birmingham-Sheffield-Newcastle

[@hb1338]

The volume of traffic city to city is much greater than city to airport. Building really good city to airport links would be much cheaper and much quicker and could be done independent of any improvements to the city to city services.

[@54scottie]

It wasn’t just London they had these bonkers ideas for heli-ports. In my native Glasgow, they floated a scheme in the post-war to build a combined car-park, bus station and heli-port straddling the River Clyde and over the approach tracks to Glasgow Central. It was designed to allow integrated transport but the images shown would have looked ghastly. Fortunately it was never built. The history of the actual heliports in London would make a fascinating video. Pretty sure one features in an episode of the New Avengers, the one where parts of the City are put to sleep.

[@AndrewG1989]

Well you got Stansted Airport railway station, Gatwick Airport railway station, Heathrow Terminals 2 & 3, Terminal 4 and Terminal railway stations. And Luton Airport Parkway railway station which now has its own Luton DART. And Southend Airport has a railway station that replaced Rochford station when it was built in 2011.

[@johna5635]

I feel there's a very specific niche developing in a few of these recent videos: 'Vintage visions of the future' - and it's something of goldmine!

[@Elizabeth2445A]

If you want an example of hopes for a VTOL passenger jet, you should have a look at the Dornier Do 31. It uses the same engines as the harrier, just two of them, and another 8 RB162 engines solely for lift. Two prototypes flew (vertically, too) and both still survive and are displayed in germany

[@hb1338]

Cancelled more than 50 years ago due to high cost and severe technical and logistical difficulties. Nothing has changed since then.

[@Tevildo]

Jago, if you haven't already, you need to do a video on the British Rail flying saucer design from 1970.

[@JagoHazzard]

I believe there is such a video somewhere.

[@skellertons113]

The West London Air Terminal. I think it was for European flights by BEA. People would check in and their luggage was loaded into a trailer and attached to a special Routemaster bus, they would board the bus and be driven to London Airport to change to the aeroplane, (Vickers Vanguard, Rolls Royce Tyne turbo prop engines, fantastic sound, or I think, the earlier Viscount, RR Dart engine, equally fantastic sound, ended up out of Southend in the nineties). The Routemasters were very special, a bigger engine, with high ratio axle, meant they could cruise down the M4 at high speed. They were owned by BEA, but crewed and maintained by London Transport at what is now Stamford Brook Garage, formerly Chiswick Tram Depot.

[@MRTransportVideos]

It seems Doctor Who must have got hold of a copy of the County of London Plan, as they visitied a parallel London in which people travelled by Airships - mind you, I doubt the Plan invisiged Cybermen...

[@danbernstein4694]

My father did a lot of development work for Vertol ( Boing Vertol) Helicopters in the Sixties about using big, high speed helicopters to connect the downtowns of DC, Philadelphia, and New York, avoiding the to/from to the airports. The main unsolved problems were the costs of the land in the 3 cities , as well as the objections of the office building neighbors who did not like the thought of dozens of loud helicopters landing every day. So the project was abandoned , but he did bring home some really neat artists renderings !

[@ChrisBrown-gu4ki]

It was in the early 1980's when NBC promoted the idea of converting Marylebone into a coach terminus and using the tunnels to access it from the north. As one of those who worked on it I remember us using a mock up of the tunnel portalband showing a coach driving through it 😂

[@highpath4776]

Would the coaches actually fit ? Could the speed limit have exceeded the then 70 for road ?

[@ChrisBrown-gu4ki]

@@highpath4776 From what I remember the coaches would fit quite comfortably . From memory I think NBC commissioned Professor Peter Hall to be the independent voice on this.

[@fabrisseterbrugghe8567]

There's a novel from the late 1930s which saw Crofton as a major aerodrome for the smart set to get out of London to chic weekend resorts all over the U.K.

[@laurencefraser]

Apparently the main thing that killed the rotodyne wasn't actually anything wrong with it (they did solve the main issue with noise well enough), but the UK deciding to smush all the aircraft manufacturers together and shoving it in with the helecopters. The people in charge of the resulting company basically canned the project on the basis that... they didn't like it. Or possibly that helecopters would take less effort due to already being an established thing by that point. Between that and a few other factors delaying the project, other solutions were found for the problems it was intended to solve. Even if the soltuion was often just 'decide that people can put up with the awful car trips to the airport'. To be fair, if you were willing to put in the time, money, and effort, the 'correct' solution was 'actually have a functional metro/intercity rail network', because short range air transport is a bad idea to begin with, but rotodynes were, to my recollection, objectively better at short range (by aircraft standards) passenger transport than small jets or large helicopters. They could take off and land from helepads (admittedly, they had to be helepads designed to take heavy helicopters, you couldn't cheap out on that) on buildings rather than going all the way to an airport, then fly to the next city over and repeat. They'd most likely have to stop at an airport somewhere in the route every so often (probably every intercity trip for safety reasons) to refuel (most helepads not being in places you really want to store aviation fuel), of course. So, I guess for business passengers they end up somewhere between a less inconvenient plane and a faster intercity bus? Like I said, they're basically competing directly with rail on the routes trains are Best at. Anyway, the point is, the technology wasn't actually a dead end, or if it was, it got killed long before that became relevant.

[@PhyllisJerry]

Just to give an idea of how well this would have worked out, New York’s Grand Central Terminal actually had a rooftop heliport courtesy of the neighboring Pan Am/MetLife building, with air taxi service to JFK Airport. The service was extremely popular and very convenient-the Pan Am building is built over Grand Central’s train shed, so you could take an elevator right from your train to the helipad. It also cost the city millions in subsidies (in the 1970s when suburbanization was at its peak and NYC was on the brink of bankruptcy), the noise drove people in neighboring buildings crazy, and eventually there was an accident in which a helicopter flipped over on the roof, with the blades falling 58 stories to the street and beheading a pedestrian. The service lasted less than a decade before New Yorkers collectively decided it wasn’t worth it and they’d just drive to the airport (which ironically still doesn’t have a direct rail connection in 2023). Glad London avoided our mistake.

[@neiloflongbeck5705]

In the 1960s Hawker Siddeley was working on a transport aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing. It was cancelled kn the same day the TSR-2 was cancelled.

[@ljosephdumas3113]

I know it's trivial but I really appreciated that the first helicopter photo had a US Coast Guard helicopter. You can tell by the hat device of the officer sitting in the right-hand seat.

[@borderlands6606]

Ten years after St Pancras' goods yards were an impromptu take-off zone, they were a depository for many Midland Region guard's vans. These were used as makeshift accommodation, though I can't recall how long and for whom. I think it was for cheap short-term holiday space. The Fairey Rotodyne was one of those marvellously thwarted mid-century modern projects I like to think of as Jet-Punk.

[@TadeuszCantwell]

You can see descendants of the city airport idea with the birth of battery powered aircraft that can fly the executive class around from city to city.

[@Daisy-tl2lh]

why!

[@francisboyle1739]

And history repeats itself!

[@hb1338]

They don't (yet) exist.

[@francisboyle1739]

@@hb1338 Except in the realm of Hyperloop style fantasies. With a bit of luck they'll stay that way.

[@rupep2424]

All we need is a network of artificial rivers for air taxis to safely fly along. So the future is, err, canals..? 🤔

[@TalesOfWar]

I got a good chuckle out of the "unrelated" footage.

[@frglee]

The Fairey Rotodyne was a large autogyro, with tip jets on the otherwise unpowered main propeller giving it VTOL capabilities as well as unpowered lift in horizontal flight when forward flight was powered by the wing engines. The Rotodyne prototype successfully transported a total 1,000 passengers and crew in 350 flights, with over 120 hours airtime. In 1959 the prototype was demonstrated on a passenger flight between Heathrow Airport to the Brussels and Paris city heliports and then shown at the Paris Air Show. Sadly the prototype was very noisy from the tip jets, and although work was ongoing to improve this, the British government pulled the plug on the development of this aircraft.

[@VictorianDad]

Beautiful footage of a sunset over a becalmed Thames at the end, there.

[@CareyMcDuff]

The shot at about 3:50 of the radar antenna turning and the plane taking off is pure artistry. Thank you for including it!

[@phaasch]

I wish I could remember where I saw it (possibly a pre war copy of the Illustrated London News), which showed a proposal for a South Bank airport, built on stilts directly across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, presumably for nobody's convenience except Mr Chamberlain's.

[@wrichard11]

No more nutty than an airport on an artificial island

[@roderickjoyce6716]

You mean the one smack bang in the middle of bird migration routes near a shipwreck containing a huge amount of unstable explosives? 😁

[@AndreiTupolev]

Like Hong Kong or Osaka

[@hb1338]

Thunderbirds are go !

[@hb1338]

@@roderickjoyce6716 .. which has no transport links to the rest of the world.

[@eddiemillington8981]

6:30 THE SHADE 😂

[@tonymcgurk5411]

Interestingly most RAF Stations of any size of any size were located near or next to railway stations Culham, Brize Norton, Fairford , Northolt (Ruislip Gardens) Cosford, Hendon

[@user-xh3lz9xt4l]

I remember a daft proposal to turn the East Anglia route from Liverpool Street into a motorway for coaches only no trains

[@heidirabenau511]

The fact that Jago put footage unreleated when showing Avanti West Coast and talking about poor services, means the opposite, the footage is releated!

[@petergray3594]

Berlin’s Templehof was fairly central, one of the 1948 airlift airports. Regent’s Park in size approx. Prevailing winds would require a London airports runway to be east to west ie runway 27 (predominantly). If only train lines into stations were straight, then a bit of clearance either side would yield a runway.

[@nickbarber2080]

Jago and Auto-shenanigans...my Sunday is complete...

[@sylviaelse5086]

During my, sadly, rather short period of flying light aircraft, there was talk of using Hyde Park as a forced landing place. But, even for a light aircraft, from the air, Hyde Park actually looks rather small for the purpose.

[@hb1338]

You'd need to cut down all the trees, and remove all the buildings for about half a mile in each direction. Imagine the uproar !

[@ianthomson9363]

I'm glad you put in more detail about S/L Lecky-Thompson's record-winning flight- when I saw XV741 near the beginning of the video I thought I'd add a bit more to the story, but you saved me the trouble.

[@JagoHazzard]

I did an entire video on the race I think last year.

[@ianthomson9363]

@@JagoHazzard Ah yes, I remember it now.

[@defender1006]

Well that opens up a whole 'can of worms' which I really hope you'll dissect at a later date?! The West London Air Terminal deserves a whole video of it's own along with the South Bank/Waterloo BEA 'Heliport'. I just love these transport overlaps/interchanges showing us what could/would have been, if 'the plan' had been stuck to? Yes, many weren't ultimately practical or sustainable, but if you don't experiment you don't get/go anywhere!

[@JagoHazzard]

I did a video on the heliport a while back, but the West London Air Terminal is one on my list.

[@Alan_UK]

I remember and used the West London Air Terminal in Kensington in the early 70s. It was very convenient. You would check in and your luggage went into a trailer pulled by a bus. The bus went to Heathrow and straight to the aircraft where we climbed the steps while our luggage was put in the hold. I can't remember what happened when we returned.

[@nezbrun872]

For some years there were check in facilities at Victoria for Gatwick airport for some airlines until about 20 years ago, and more recently the same was launched at Paddington around 2010 for Heathrow which I think terminated in 2013. ISTR there ws an Airportr bag drop off service announced relatively recently for BA passengers travelling on the Heathrow Express. I guess as most people check in online these days, a baggage checking facility would be the only value.

[@paulketchupwitheverything767]

There was also an old Imperial Airways/BOAC terminal at Victoria. This chap Jago Hazzard made a video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mKjMdHith9dkfsk

[@hb1338]

By far the largest problem with remote check-in is handling the bags in timely and efficient manner.

[@davidsummer8631]

That West London Air Terminal might now look like a curiosity but I guess before the tube made its way to Heathrow that was the easiest way to get to the airport

[@Backroad_Junkie]

Hey! When I was a kid, I'm pretty sure we were supposed to have flying cars before long. They never did get that anti-gravity bit correct, though...

[@Larry]

When they say verticle take offs, could they also be refering to things like Zepplins? You see all those stories about the empire state building being retrofitted into being a zepplin boarding station, so could they have planned that for the UK? Also, I temember seeing photos of New York having runways build far above buildings held up with massivly long poles. Making the whole city permanantly dark and a spider's web of steel structures to hold the things up. So probably why it was rejected :D

[@JagoHazzard]

I do like the idea of zeppelins. If only to maintain my steampunk fantasies.

[@wingshad0w00982]

I feel like at least a few people behind this plan thought that when they said ‘vertical take off air craft’ they saw prop planes that that just took off vertically. I know that’s unrealistic, but so is this plan.

[@tastymoves]

Why must you make me imagine zeppelins hovering over London while people clamber up towers or ladders to get on.... a nightmare.

[@chauyang7159]

Great content as usual!

[@user-xh3lz9xt4l]

I also remember the West London Air Terminal for either Heathrow or Luton. It was awful. Nowhere near a tube station so it was a pain

[@joshuabessire9169]

Planners in 1943: "If we propose to make our stations into airports now, there will be less opposition to funding our UFO later."

[@isoroxuk]

Avanti: ooh we’re in a video! Great!

[@shodan2958]

Any proposal to demolish St Pancras gets an immediate "No, no and no" from me to be honest. Its the most glorious looking station I know of and i have no shame of admitting I've been in the station twice just to look at it. I love it.

[@hb1338]

A "glorious" red brick monstrosity. Other opinions are available. 😀

[@shodan2958]

@@hb1338 I mean its all subjective ultimately and your never going to get a definitive answer on this sort of thing. You like what you like

[@loopwithers]

Jago, I too have some of these plans. They expand to include municipal airports for all major towns and cities! An extremely brave new world.

[@billsmith5648]

"Helicopter taxis" were still in vogue when the Stevenage new town plan was drawn up in 1946 - it's the reason early neighbourhoods were built without garages or parking spaces because no-one would need a car...

[@Albanwinter]

I am watching this just before bedtime. I have just laid eyes on that Fairey Rotodyne. I think I may have nightmares now. That is one frightening contraption. I don't trust helicopters. They're just scary. My favorite "Heck no I'm not getting on a helicopter" story was one that I heard about Sean Bean. While filming certain scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy they had to use a helicopter to get them up the side of a mountain. Sean hated the thought of flying in a helicopter so much that he opted to actually climb up to where they were filming. Good on you, Sean!

[@PavlosPapageorgiou]

Excellent episode. They were not qualitatively naive but got scaling wrong in several ways. A DC3 could indeed land in a small aerodrome, but that quickly changed. Berlin's airports, esp. Tempelhof, were built to that older scale. Helicopters never became commodity transport. By the way New York had a helicopter service from JFK to the roof of the Pan Am building (now Met Life building) next to Grand Central station. It closed after an accident.

[@CarolineFord1]

This makes me think of helimeds - the air ambulances. They land on top of hospital buildings in London, and land in places like parks. It doesn't scale particularly well but St George's and Kings have heliports and the only real issue is the noise. I think larger scale use would run into the same issue I think about with flying cars - how do you control traffic in 3 dimensions? The dream of the flying car seems very individualistic - you take off and get out of the jam, not every car driver doing the same. You'd need intensive air traffic control at a minimum!

[@eljanrimsa5843]

@@CarolineFord1 The problem is you compare it to cars in the first place. Cars are not an efficient way to transport people.

[@hb1338]

@@CarolineFord1 The real problem with helicopters is capacity - about 50 on a Chinook compared with several hundred on a train.

[@TheEarlofK]

Fascinating to hear about the proposal for an airport being situated on the site of Hyde Park, laughable today, but I do remember when the London City Airport was built, they said that it would only utilise small short take-off and landing aircraft, but that soon morphed into jet aircraft and I was disappointed when they demolished the CWS flour mill on Royal Victoria Dock to facilitate them.

[@highpath4776]

A lot of the new towns were planned to be away from the stations into london to discourage commuting and for light dispersed industry to be in the places like Hemel Hempstead, Harlow , Milton Keynes such that they would be more self sufficient. Whoever was planning the new towns, were they talking to to rail/transport/ London planners ?

[@hb1338]

That is exactly what Russia did. As the various industries have died, people have been left stranded in ghost towns.

[@unclenogbad1509]

Anyone wanting an idea of how air technology was supposed to continue to develop should get hold of some old Eagle annuals from the 1950's. I've got a few, one of which includes 'bouncing' Barnes Wallis' design for a VTOL supersonic airliner. Pity Britain was so broke after the war, air technology being one of the major costs to be cut. According to Eagle, we could even have been first into space. Oh well. As to the 'great plan for London' you mention - would that be the one that consisted mainly of finishing off anything the Luftwaffe had left behind, and then shoving big lumps of concrete into the resulting gaps?

[@MakeSomeNoiseAgencyPlaylists]

....really liked your "War" quotation by Edwin Starr. As you might know he actually died back in 2003 in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire, England ! 🌺

[@sabinebogensperger1928]

Fascinating, if bonkers (the ideas)! Thank you!

[@GiselleBel]

Rather bonkers! Such an interesting video, thanks so much for this!

[@DavidShepheard]

Although this sounds silly as a passenger service, the ability to land an air-ambulance on top of any London terminal station could help save lives.

[@richardwillson101]

Ooo Brooklands, I was there today. Although I didnt know it was "Emergency services" display day. The place was rammed.

[@luisstransport]

Great video Jago

[@bigaspidistra]

Pre WW2 Railway Air Services had been the main domestic airline, feeding into Imperial Airlines intercontinental routes at Croydon. So it may have been thought natural that raileay companies would continue to be involved with air transport to supplement or replace the rail operations.

[@galinneall]

Great video as usual. I rather thought you might say more about the West London Air Terminal, but that might be a good idea for a video of its own in future.

[@TheAltonEllis]

Another fantastic video, Jago - I thank you! They are ALWAYS top quality but it appears that the RESOLUTION of this video is superb - have you begun using new equipment…?

[@neilbain8736]

There's a bigger dystopian picture here. There were a series of reports- The Abercrombie Reports- and that needs a video too- about more or less knocking 7 bells out of cities and doing unto them what eventually became Birmingham or elsewhere- Sheffield of the 80's I remember too: I never saw the fish tank, but I've seen the pictures and they say it all. Anyway, the point is that it was quite freely thought out. Who'd have thought that, eh?, that a mindset could severe the past so brutally and freely conceive in such shortsighted longterm detail. New towns and Brutalist architecture- a thought coin for the ages. But the bigger picture seems that society was jumping on the bandwaggon. When the Waverley was launched in 1946 by the LNER, the press release said that one day people would be able to fly from Glasgow to Dunoon (Fly me to Dunoon, ma daddy wiz a Yank ma mamee isnae sure) I think the journey time was given as 15 mins. It seems fanciful now, and was really quite an exotic thing to say back then. People historically would commute from the villages and towns around the Clyde's fjord like coast. The 1890's ding dong races by the Caley, NB and GSWR ships to their Pierhead terminals and trains into Glasgow are legendary. It was assumed that this commuting would remain necessary, though it was utterly unsustainable and the LNER would have been aware of this. They had wanted out of the Clyde since the 1930's. So the comment might have been press hype but it seems to have been designed on the back of the times and a mindset stemming from the visions from 1943.

[@hb1338]

The phrase "there is devil in the detail" should be sufficient to neutralise the free thinkers.

[@stephenspackman5573]

I'd never really thought about struction as a general activity. Say, the thing I wonder about in this context is why people never discuss the fact that trains going too fast and coming off the rails could be turned to a positive. Are any of the major stations aligned in such a way that fully ballistic trains (presumably equipped with small ramps at the ends of long sidings) could actually end up crash^H^H^H^H^Hlanding anywhere useful? Presumably wings would pop out to help them glide farther.

[@jasonschubert6828]

I can't help but think that the checking in before you get on your transport _to_ the airport is a good idea, although I have been (w)racking my brain and can't really come up with a reason why. It just _seems_ like it would be easier.

[@hb1338]

The main problem is the bags - people can make their own way to the gate, but luggage can't. The amount of effort to receive, check and move a comparatively small number of bags is very large, especially if the bus from the remote check-in serves more than one flight. I worked on a project which investigated ways of reducing the mis-ship rate and the conclusion was that as many bags as possible must go through the automated handling systems in the terminal.

[@thefatcontrollershat]

Maybe James was right to fear that the Red Balloon would steal his passengers

[@brettpalfrey4665]

Blimey, Jago, have you been following me around? I was at Brooklands last week too! A good bit of info, glad you included The Harrier covering everyone with coal dust at RAF St Pancras in 1969! Poor Sqn Ldr Lecky-Thompson stank of coal dust all the way to New York...But nowadays, E Vtol air taxis may be about to take to the skies over London, New York , Paris and Peckham...

[@eekee6034]

I wonder if they were thinking of aurogyros or their truly VTOL offspring, gyrodynes. The Fairey Rotadyne is a gyrodyne, though the gyrodyne concept was patented in 1936. Autogyros were the first successful rotorcraft and while they can't hover, they have a very short takeoff and landing distance. (Fans of Igor Sisorsky should note that practical helicopters had to wait for an invention developed for autogyros.) I don't suppose they were thinking of airships, but I'm getting a wonderful mental image at the thought of great airships moored at every major station. :)

[@benjones1917]

Actually not far off some of the eVTOL concepts doing the rounds now

[@tsungiraichiramba]

Class Jago

[@seanbonella]

Im hungover, this Jago made my day

[@simonwinter8839]

Cheers

[@atinofspam3433]

ah yes, taxi planes from train stations to main airports. There is one flaw with this idea: I have, along with countless other people, on multiple occasions taken a TRAIN from a train station to an airport.

[@highpath4776]

we did get Battersea Heliport, not that it was easy to use for journeys within London.

[@regkray]

There was also the Trig Lane Heliport, a short walk from Mansion House. It was used by a certain David Springbett to break the world record for travelling from the City to Wall Street, a feat achieved in under 4 hours. That was back in the days of Concorde of course, (February 1982). In terms of the ease of international travel we certainly seem to have regressed.

[@john07973]

Another good video 👍

[@michellebell5092]

Hugely interesting story though which , I must shameful admit, I had not heard about. Once again, thanks Jh/TftT

[@michaelwright2986]

The idea of turning railway stations into airports turns out to have been completely wrong, but they weren't necessarily crazy future fondlers. One thing that occurred to me was that in 1943, it wasn't yet completely obvious that the airship was a Bad Thing and could never be really successful, so that might have been a possibility on their minds (on a small scale). They also didn't imagine the sheer scale of future air transport, so "taxi planes" might well have been little 6-10 seaters, which could feasibly have operated from marshalling yards. Expensive, of course, to fly in such little planes, but they also hadn't foreseen the democratisation of air travel, and thought of it as still being for the rich: in 1943, they could imagine flying cars and spaceflight, but not Ryanair. And I expect there will still be proposals for heliports in the future. What strikes me more is not getting it wrong about how air transport would develop, but a sort of planners' hubris that makes them think in terms of massive destruction and rebuilding according to a clean-sheet proposal, and not think about how organic development could be shaped and guided. Though maybe, having lived through the Blitz, they were determined that this opportunity would NOT be missed, the way it was after the Great Fire.

[@wickiezulu]

Ideas for a London airport at the sites of RAF Matching, RAF Chipping Ongar aka Willingale and less likely RAF Fairlop (albeit on a smaller scale at most a la City Airport) would have been relatively more sensible. The latter was already near the Central (that also might help explain the bus shelter at Newbury Park, ideas for a rail branch at Newbury Park to Harold Hill / Brentwood via Collier Row as well as parts of the stillborn North Orbital Road of Ringway 4 / M12 / Dagenham Corridor routes of the Ringways), while both Matching and Willingale could have spurred rail links to Chelmsford from both Harlow Town and Ongar stations possibly at Margaretting as well as other nearby routes benefiting from ideas for a rail link from Ingatestone to Pitsea, thereby link them to Southend airport. Another idea would have been to add transport links to Biggin Hill via Tramlink at New Addington and mainline / Fleet / Bakerloo via Hayes.

[@1fourcore]

My geography teacher was part of the study for this project. At the time Heathrow had one day ayear less fog than the rest .which at the time was a big deal as no high tech take off and land in the fog then . So Heathrow was chosen.

[@Lurker1979]

I'm still waiting for my personal jetpacks.