“I have the licence.” Such were the first words uttered by TAG Aviation’s commercial director Len Rayment during an interview with EBAN in early January.

TAG has been developing and upgrading the business aviation facilities of the UK’s Farnborough Airport for the past four years in order that CAA certification may be achieved. And finally it has.

With some relief, Rayment explained: “It’s been quite a lengthy, technically-involved task to get complete compliance. I would say we are 18 months to two years longer than we anticipated in terms of dealing with the planning and licensing issues.”

The delays have come about because of the inevitable politics involved in developing an airport. Not on a national scale – after all, the UK government has been behind the development of Farnborough as a business aviation airport from the outset – but on a local scale.

Said Rayment: “We had to deal with the genuine issues of the local population. It was frustrating but with respect, people have their rights. You can’t just go out and walk roughshod over the environmental community and in any case, we wouldn’t want to.

“I can confidently say we are now going ahead with the majority of local people’s support.”

Before compliance could be achieved, the last hurdle involved knocking down the old tower and gaining final clearance of the new tower operation. Further to the tower, Rayment explained what else the airport has to offer visiting business aircraft.

He said: “We have ILS on both runways. We have 120,000 square feet of new hangarage, capable

of taking up to BBJ2 size aircraft.

And by April, we’ll have something like 40,000 square feet of office accommodation and will have started working on the new passenger facility. This, I would expect to be complete by the end of 2004.”

At the beginning of last year, TAG saw some substantial dips in traffic figures at the airport although it

did just break 15,000 movements by year-end. Said Rayment: “I’m fully expecting to see a 10 to 15 per cent growth on top of that this year. We’re getting more based aircraft here and larger aircraft as well.

“We all tend to use movements as the criteria for success but it’s worth remembering that that’s not the real measurement of commercial success – it’s the gross revenues that are relevant. You obviously earn far more from a BBJ than you do a Citation.”

Farnborough will be far from alone in vying for the attentions of corporate traffic to London but there are several reasons why TAG believes it is a stand-out choice.

Rayment enthused: “You’ve got exclusivity – that’s a big factor.

The aircraft aren’t fighting for space with scheduled, holiday and freight flights. Effectively, every aircraft coming through is being given vip treatment.

“And although we don’t have resident customs or immigration, after 13 years of developing relation-ships with them, it works very smoothly so long as people are able to give us prior notice.

“And as we all know, without an ILS, 80 per cent of the US operators won’t even look at you. If you look at the traffic that has been coming through here, particularly in the latter part of the year, we’re getting more and more of the US traffic because we have the ILS in operation on both runways.”

As concerns the airport’s location – reportedly one hour from touchdown to downtown in non-rush hour traffic – TAG is more than happy with its lot. Rayment said: “A lot of our traffic is attracted to the UK’s southwest quadrant, coming out from the centre of London. Right the way out from the M40 motorway round to the A3 trunk road, there’s a tremendous amount of development, particularly out on the M4 corridor.

“You’ve got a lot of businesses around there – Lego, Mars and all the computer boys around the Silicon Valley. It’s pretty clear to me that the captains of industry all live in the southwest quadrant.”