By Updesh Kapur/Doha


This week Dubai came out with a story that sent shivers through a great British institution.
For decades, UK Inc has relied heavily on its premier gateway as the entry point to a diverse nation.
Welcoming people back home after an overseas jaunt, migrants seeking pastures new, those looking to reunite with friends and family, individuals planning a holiday break or simply international business houses travelling to secure those all important corporate deals.
London is one of the world’s primary economic hubs and a tourist haven.
None of the above will ever change. But what will is London Heathrow, now officially no longer the world’s business international airport in terms of annual passenger traffic. Dubai has taken over.
Heathrow had around 68.1mn international passengers using its five terminal facility during 2014, compared with around 70.5mn flying in and out of Dubai International.
Heathrow in fact saw more overall number of passengers – 73.4mn – but 5.3mn of these were domestic travellers.
Not much difference in international passenger numbers, but enough to signal a sign of defeat by the British airport to its Dubai rival. For Dubai, seven hours flying time from Heathrow that is decades older, to secure top tier status is a feather in its cap.
Heathrow will continue to attract passengers in their droves. It is a premier airport luring virtually all of the world’s main airlines. The airport is a British institution.
This week’s news may have sent shivers through Britain, but certainly not come as a surprise to observers.
Heathrow has gradually been losing its high ranking position in relative terms to Dubai for years. A sharp rise in annual passenger numbers at Dubai, with a relatively slow rate of growth at Heathrow has resulted in the crown changing hands.
“Britain has benefited from being home to the world’s largest port or airport for the last 350 years. But lack of capacity at Heathrow means we have inevitably lost our crown to Dubai,” said a Heathrow spokeswoman confidently.
She went on: “This highlights the pressing need to get on and expand our own hub so that we can connect the whole of the UK to global growth.”
 By contrast, Dubai is enjoying the limelight.
“This historic milestone is the culmination of over five decades of double-digit average growth,” said Dubai Airports chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum. “The goal is to make Dubai a global centre of aviation and we are nearing that goal.” The story behind the stats makes interesting reading.
Over 60% of Heathrow’s business is reliant on point to point traffic. Simply translated, this means passengers fly in and of Heathrow as opposed to transiting through the airport. It’s a business model that has grown, but so too has Heathrow’s increasing reliance on transit passengers between connecting flights to compete with the likes of neighbouring European airports, and indeed Dubai.
Heathrow has had no choice but to change its model and try to attract more transfer traffic from different parts of the world but faces severe infrastructure constraints.
The airport is operating at 98% capacity. There’s little room to grow. Lack of runway and terminal infrastructure is preventing further growth. There are aircraft departures and arrivals every two minutes at its two runways for almost 20 hours every day. A 24-hour operation is ruled out due to an overnight curfew on aircraft movements.
Heathrow is currently the subject of a runway expansion inquiry. Either Heathrow gets a third runway or neighbouring London Gatwick secures the green light for a second airstrip to help solve the runway crunch in South East England.
A decision is expected in the summer but building a new runway and overcoming any regulatory obstacles could take years.
For Heathrow, these are nervous times. Desperate to increase capacity, yet it faces the onslaught of protestors opposing its expansion on environmental grounds and concerns over mass disruption within the airport’s vicinity.
By contrast, the transit model is what Dubai has excelled at, in making a name for itself. A low home-based population like Doha and other key Gulf cities, Dubai has only had a single vision to fufill its ambitions to become the world’s busiest airport.
To do this, Dubai has had to market itself as a tourist hub and with a strong airport/airline infrastructure at the crossroads of East and West. It is this bridge linking cities around the world through a single hub that has given rise to Dubai’s fortunes.
Flying times of 18 hours or so non-stop can connect Dubai with cities across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Indian sub continent, Asia Pacific and both North and South America. Dubai International is home to Emirates, the Middle East’s largest carrier, which along with Abu Dhabi’s Etihad and Doha’s Qatar’ Airways, has seized a significant portion of travel between the West, Asia and Australasia.
While both Doha and Abu Dhabi are recording strong growth, these two airports are far from close to Dubai’s figures. The latter will boost its annual passenger throughput to around 79mn passengers this year helped by the opening of a new hall for departures and arrivals.
As the world’s largest operator of the biggest aircraft in the skies – the Airbus A380 superjumbo –with over 50 of these planes currently in its large fleet, Dubai-based Emirates’ strategy of only flying twin-aisle wide body commercial jets has been largely responsible for the surge in Dubai’s passenger traffic.
Operating multi-frequency daily flights between Dubai and cities around the world provides passengers with greater choice and ease of connecting rather than face inevitable congestion and delayed flights within the sprawling Heathrow experience.
Dubai has its own answer to congestion knowing very well that its main international airport does not have endless growth.
With over 100 of the A380s in the pipeline, each with a capacity for over 450 passengers, Emirates will have to eventually move to a new home away from the constraints at its existing airport. But this is not seen as a problem.
Unlike Heathrow, Dubai already has a sister airport in the wings.
Located 50km away, Al-Maktoum International’s six runway facility opened to passenger business in 2013 and will be capable of handling 120mn travellers when fully operational by 2020.
Incredibly, Dubai’s increase in passenger numbers last year comes despite a significant disadvantage experiencing a fall in the number of flights taking off in 2014, due to an 11-week runway refurbishment project.
It handled one-fifth fewer flights than London Heathrow last year. But the average load on each plane landing or taking off from Dubai was 196, compared with just 145 on the typical flight to or from Heathrow. This is indeed a tale of two airports thousands of miles apart with London Heathrow and Dubai handling capacity constraints in different ways.
One faces potential opposition to growth while another simply continues to plough in bigger jets in preparation for a move to a new home in the long-term. Heathrow, for sure, has its work cut out to regain that all-important crown.

♦ UpdeshKapur is a PR & communications professional, columnist, aviation, hospitality and travel analyst, social and entertainment writer. He can be followed on twitter @updeshkapur