Bernard Ginns: Heathrow connection links us to the physical internet

The airline will reconnect the region to Heathrow and hence to 170 major destinations around the world.

It will be the first time that the region has had a link to the world’s busiest airport since early 2009, when BMI scrapped its service.

In the meantime, Yorkshire business leaders have had to travel to Manchester or Amsterdam for onward connections to the rest of the world.

For a region with aspirations to be internationally competitive, it was a desperate handicap.

John Parkin, chief executive of the airport, said BA’s return to West Yorkshire after 32 years connects Yorkshire to the mainstream of global economic growth. “Businesses do not do business in locations they can’t get to,” he said. “The world is now open to the Leeds city region.”

I would maintain that the benefits will be felt wider than just the city region.

Mr Parkin went on: “The unmeasurable part of all this will be the businesses who were considering doing business in Britain and in West Yorkshire who before today would not have done so because of lack of international connectivity will now decide to do business here. Who knows what that will bring?

“If foreign investors can’t get to a place however attractive it is to invest in, it is a problem. Inward investment has to be able to get from A to B.”

The four-times daily service – which starts in December – was made possible by the £172m acquisition of BMI, which allowed BA to take advantage of new landing slots at Heathrow.

Andy Lord, operations director at BA, told the Yorkshire Post: “We are very confident the route will be a success and will make a huge contribution to the economy in the region as well as bringing in travel and tourism and business into the UK which will benefit the overall UK economy.”

There is a wider point to be made here. According to the late science fiction writer JG Ballard, the airport will be the true city of the 21st century.

He wrote: “The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose fauborgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.”

The quote is used in the frontispiece of the new book, Aerotropolis, which forecasts how a combination of airport, city and business hub will be at the heart of the next phase of globalisa-tion.

Authors John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay assert that “rather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them”.

“Why? Because people once chose to live in cities for the wealth of connections they offered socially, financially, intellectually, and so forth.

“But in the era of globalisation, we choose cities drawing closer together themselves, linked by fibre-optic cables and jet aircraft.”

Despite the widely-held assumption that the US economy (and by implication the rest of the West) is dominated by services, the authors argue that it is still by and large a goods economy.

Mr Kasarda said: “A large and growing proportion of these goods moves internationally as a consequence of trade and modern supply chains.

“Components are made in a dozen countries and assembled in a thirteenth.

“They move by air either because there’s an emergency, because it’s too valuable to sit in a warehouse, or because it’s perishable, like flowers, fish and pharmaceuticals.

“All of this passes through a physical internet, the network of hubs and places for trading and transporting goods – and people – almost as quickly as the internet itself. And it’s arguably more important – the Web can’t move your box from Amazon.

“The aerotropolis is the urban incarnation of the physical internet.

“The three rules of real estate have changed from location, location, location, to accessibility, accessibility, accessibility.”

The book estimates that the world’s governments are poised to spend $35 trillion on infrastructure over the next two decades, which will reset the new global pecking order.

Does Yorkshire want to figure in that new world order?

Of course it does. But it needs to get its act together and support the new route.

In the longer term, access has to be improved to Leeds Bradford Airport; it needs better road links and it needs a rail connection.

And when the investment is found, the local authorities must provide their full support and not put obstacles in the way.