Heathrow Hub is the promoter of a patented scheme for an extended single runway at Heathrow Airport and is the principal project of Runway Innovations Ltd, a privately backed, independent company. 

The idea for the single extended runway was originally developed by Captain Jock Lowe, the longest serving Concorde pilot and former Director of flight operations at British Airways.

Whilst Heathrow Hub promoted a detailed and costed scheme to enhance Heathrow, Runway Innovations is now marketing the extended single runway concept  around the World to other airports.

Our concept is an innovative and ingenious way to optimise efficiency and flight schedules and increase airport capacity while mitigating environmental impacts.

Rather than building new parallel runways, as seen at many major airports where demand has outstripped capacity, our extended single runway design allows existing runways to be extended, creating two runway strips instead of one. The design encompasses offset and angled runways as well as in-line runways.

As well as increasing runway throughput, it allows the most efficient airfield design, reducing taxing distances (and therefore emissions) and reducing the risk of runway incursions.

Runway Innovations takes advantage of new developments in on-board aircraft equipment, such as automatic braking advisory and runway over-run protection systems, to allow an equally sophisticated runway design, to optimise efficiency and reduce environmental impacts.

For example, in normal operations, aircraft would land on one of the in-line runways and take off at the other. However, in, say early mornings, a particularly noise sensitive time of day, arriving aircraft would land on the furthest of the in-line runways (usually used for departures but available at a time when there are no, or very few departures), dramatically reducing noise impacts outside the airport.

Conversely, in late evenings, aircraft would take off from the runway normally used for arrivals.

The cost to develop an extended single runway is also much less than a conventional, parallel runway, with the added benefits of requiring less space, allowing more efficient operations and likely to be less disruptive to local infrastructure and property around an airport.

Safety is of course critical and our exhaustive work, led by a world class team of consultants and peer reviewed by senior safety experts from around the world, has confirmed that our design is not only safe, but in many respects easier and safer to operate than the traditional alternative of multiple parallel runways.