LOX Summary Report : Introduction

The LOX project is presented as a solution to the impending crisis in airport capacity in the South East region of the United Kingdom. It is for a new four runway airport near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. It is put forward as the 'Best Practicable Environmental Option' for airport development in the region – its environmental impacts being lower than all the alternative airports advanced in the national consultation on the Future Development of Air Transport in the United Kingdom: South East.

LOX would provide an integrated transport hub at a hub airport with a large runway capacity, yet with a comparatively low level of environmental impacts.

Location map: LOX in the South East Region

Figure 1: South East Region Larger image (pdf) (148k)

LOX is advanced as the 'Best Practicable Environmental Option' for air transport in the region for these reasons:

sufficient land is available;
good surface access transport links with central London, other parts of the South East and the United Kingdom;
few people would be displaced by the development;
it is close to the demand and highly accessible to the majority of Great Britain;
the combined environmental impacts of the project are assessed as significantly lower than any of the currently proposed Government options [note 1];
to serve as a hub airport for Great Britain, rather than merely the South East region, the new airport is sited outside of the transportation 'shadow' cast by Greater London, with good motorway and rail links to central London, the Midlands, Northern England and the South West;
the airport adjoins the Western Arc area of managed growth to the west of London: it would augment the economic potential of this sub-region and thereby assist in the maintenance of the Capital's status as a global centre;
its location would also ensure that transatlantic and transpolar flights would avoid many of the restrictions imposed by capacity limitations in London airspace;
its proximity to Heathrow airport with a dedicated rail link would offer the opportunity for a dual-hub of airports providing an unparalleled level of service;
it would provide competition to the BAA monopoly.

Note 1

The Future Development of Air Transport in the United Kingdom: South East: A National Consultation". Department for Transport. London, July 2002.
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The LOX Report

❖ The LOX Report is freely available as PDF documents here.

The White Paper

Department for Transport (2003). White Paper: The Future of Air Transport (PDF document), London, HMSO.

Review:
Review of London Oxford Airport (PDF document), Halcrow (2003).

Note:
The former links to these documents are 'dead'. Both were available online on government websites, but the tiresome habit of the British Civil Service of 'burying' information seems to have endured into the age of the internet. The former link to Review of London Oxford Airport (PDF document), Halcrow (2003), if followed beyond the re-direct page, yields a looped link—misleading re-titled as The Future of Air Transport - White Paper and the Civil Aviation Bill. Thus the supposedly archived documents are effectively hidden: hence we provide them through the above links to our archive copies of the originals. [Unsuprisingly] all references to LOX have disappeared from .gov.uk sites.