Early in the COVID pandemic, Heathrow decided to operate arrivals and departures on the same runway. Which runway would change at 3pm daily, in order to spread noise amongst local residents.

Heathrow Airport has today announced that the more normal operation – one runway for landing and the other for take offs will return on 5 July. The runways switch at 3pm as before.

Full details can be found here.

Heathrow have indicated that they had between 376 and 528 movements per day in June. They think July may be up to 800, depending on the UK Governments announcements on 19 July, dubbed ‘Freedom Day’ by the UK Government and nobody else.

There are suggestions also that the UK COVID apps vaccination codes may be accepted for travel to Europe, despite the best efforts of the German and French Governments to ban arrivals from the UK. This could considerably increase demand for flights to Europe, even as the Financial Times pours cold water on the UK-USA corridor arrangements.