London Heathrow Airport – named London Airport until 1966 – is the primary and largest international airport serving London, the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It is the largest of the six international airports in the London airport system (the others being Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City, and Southend).
The airport is owned and operated by Heathrow Airport Holdings. In 2025, Heathrow was the busiest airport in Europe, the fifth-busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic and the second-busiest airport in the world by international passenger traffic. Heathrow was the airport with the most international connections in the world in 2024.
Heathrow was founded as a small airfield in 1930 but was developed into a much larger airport after World War II. It lies west of Central London on a site that covers . It was gradually expanded over 75 years and now has two parallel east–west runways, four operational passenger terminals and one cargo terminal. The airport is the primary hub for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.
History
The airport was opened on 25 March 1946 as London Airport; it was renamed Heathrow Airport in the last week of September 1966, to avoid confusion with the other two main airports which serve London: Gatwick and Stansted. The airport's Central Terminal Area (CTA) was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who set out the terminals and central-area buildings, including the control tower and the multi-faith St George's Chapel.
Operations
Facilities Heathrow Airport is used by over 89 airlines flying to 214 destinations in 84 countries. The airport is the primary hub for British Airways and Virgin Atlantic. It has four passenger terminals (numbered 2 to 5) and a cargo terminal. In 2021, Heathrow served 19.4 million passengers, of which 17 million were international and 2.4 million domestic. The busiest year ever recorded was 2024, when 83.9 million passengers travelled through the airport. Heathrow is the UK's largest airport by value, with a network of over 218 destinations worldwide. The busiest single destination in passenger numbers is New York, with over threemillion passengers flying between Heathrow and JFK Airport in 2021.
In the 1950s, Heathrow had six runways, arranged in three pairs at different angles in the shape of a hexagram with the permanent passenger terminal in the middle and the older terminal along the north edge of the field; two of its runways would always be within 30° of the wind direction. As the required length for runways has grown, Heathrow now has only two parallel runways running east–west. These are extended versions of the two east–west runways from the original hexagram. From the air, almost all of the original runways can still be seen, incorporated into the present taxiway system.
North of the northern runway and the former taxiway and aprons, now the site of extensive car parks, is the entrance to the access tunnel and the site of Heathrow's unofficial "gate guardian". For many years, the home of a 40% scale model of a British Airways Concorde, G-CONC, has been occupied by an Emirates Airbus A380 model since 2008. Heathrow Airport has Anglican, Catholic, Free Church, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh chaplains. There is a multi-faith prayer room and counselling room in each terminal, in addition to St. George's Interdenominational Chapel in an underground vault adjacent to the old control tower, where Christian services take place. The chaplains organise and lead prayers at certain times in the prayer room.
The airport has its resident press corps, consisting of six photographers and one TV crew, serving all the major newspapers and television stations around the world.
Cargo The top cargo export destinations include the United States, China, and the United Arab Emirates, handling 1.4 million tonnes of cargo in 2022. The top products exported were books, salmon, and medicine.
Flight movements
Aircraft destined for Heathrow are usually routed to one of four holding points. Air traffic controllers at Heathrow Approach Control (based in Swanwick, Hampshire) then guide the aircraft to their final approach, merging aircraft from the four holds into a single stream of traffic, sometimes as close as apart. Considerable use is made of continuous descent approach techniques to minimise the environmental effects of incoming aircraft, particularly at night. Once an aircraft is established on its final approach, control is handed over to Heathrow Tower.
When runway alternation was introduced, aircraft generated significantly more noise on departure than when landing, so a preference for westerly operations during daylight was introduced, which continues to this day.During periods of westerly operation, aircraft continue to fly in a westerly direction with an easterly tailwind component of up to , if the runway is dry and there is no significant crosswind. In this mode, aircraft take off to the west and land from the east over London, thereby minimising noise impact on the most densely populated areas. Heathrow's two runways generally operate in segregated mode, with landings on one runway and takeoffs on the other. To further reduce noise nuisance, the use of runways 27R and 27L is swapped at 15:00 local time each day if the wind is from the west. When landings are easterly, there is no alternation; 09L remains the landing runway and 09R the takeoff runway due to the legacy of the now rescinded Cranford Agreement, pending taxiway works to allow the roles to be reversed. As of 2025, Hillingdon Council is considering plans submitted by Heathrow Airport Limited for infrastructure works to facilitate runway alternation during easterly operations. Occasionally, landings are allowed on the nominated departure runway to help reduce airborne delays and to position landing aircraft closer to their terminal, reducing taxi times.
Night-time flights at Heathrow are subject to restrictions. Between 23:00 and 04:00, the noisiest aircraft (rated QC/8 and QC/16) cannot be scheduled for operation. Also, during the night quota period (23:30–06:00), there are four limits: A limit on the number of flights allowed. A Quota Count system which limits the total amount of noise permitted, but allows operators to choose to operate fewer noisy aircraft or a greater number of quieter planes. QC/4 aircraft cannot be scheduled for operation. A voluntary agreement with the airlines that no early-morning arrivals will be scheduled to land before 04:30.
A trial of "noise-relief zones" ran from December 2012 to March 2013, which concentrated approach flight paths into defined areas, compared with the existing, more spread-out paths. The zones used alternated weekly, meaning residents in the "no-fly" areas received respite from aircraft noise for set periods. However, it was concluded that some residents in other areas experienced more noise as a consequence of the trial and that it should therefore not be taken forward in its current form. Heathrow received more than 25,000 noise complaints in just three months over the summer of 2016, but around half were made by the same ten people.
In the 2010s, the arrival procedures were revised to reduce stacking by introducing variable speed limits and alternative holding procedures.
In 2017, Heathrow introduced "Fly Quiet & Green", a quarterly published league table (suspended in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic) that awards points to the 50 busiest airlines at the airport, ostensibly based on their performance relative to each other across a range of seven environmental benchmarks, such as emissions. Heathrow has acknowledged, but not attempted to refute, criticism over discrepancies and a lack of transparency over the way in which the figures are calculated. The airport has always refused to publish a breakdown showing how many "Fly Quiet points" each performance benchmark has contributed towards the total score it awards to an airline, thereby putting obstacles in the way of any independent auditing of the published results. Among other criticisms of the league table are the unexplained omission of some of the poorer performers among the 50 busiest airlines and the emphasis on relative rather than absolute performance, so an airline could well improve its "Fly Quiet" score quarter-on-quarter even if its environmental performance had in fact worsened over the period. In October 2024, Heathrow finally reinstated the programme, rebadged as "Fly Quieter & Greener". Two more environmental benchmarks were added to the previous seven, but in all other respects, the aforementioned deficiencies of the original scheme remain.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Heathrow has seen a large increase in cargo-only flights, not only by already established carriers operating cargo-only flights using passenger aircraft, but also by several cargo-only airlines.– Heathrow News retrieved 20 January 2021
Third runway
In September 2012, the British government established the Airports Commission, an independent commission chaired by Sir Howard Davies to examine various options for increasing capacity at UK airports. In July 2015, the commission backed a third runway at Heathrow, which the government approved in October 2016. However, the Court of Appeal rejected this plan, on the basis that the government failed to consider climate change and the environmental impact of aviation. On 16 December 2020, the UK Supreme Court lifted the ban on the third runway expansion, allowing the construction plan to go ahead.
Regulation
Until it was required to sell Gatwick and Stansted Airports, Heathrow Airport Holdings, owned mostly by FGP and Qatar Investment Authority and CDPQ held a dominant position in the London aviation market and has been heavily regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as to how much it can charge airlines to land. The annual increase in landing charge per passenger was capped at inflation minus 3% until 1 April 2003. From 2003 to 2007, charges rose by inflation plus 6.5% per year, reaching £9.28 per passenger in 2007. In March 2008, the CAA announced that the charge would be allowed to increase by 23.5% to £12.80 from 1 April 2008 and by inflation plus 7.5% for each of the following four years. In April 2013, the CAA announced a proposal for Heathrow to charge fees calculated by inflation minus 1.3%, continuing until 2019. Whilst the charges for landing at Heathrow are determined by the CAA and Heathrow Airport Holdings, the allocation of landing slots to airlines is carried out by Airport Co-ordination Limited (ACL).
Until 2008, air traffic between Heathrow and the United States was strictly governed by the countries' bilateral Bermuda II treaty. The treaty originally allowed only British Airways, Pan Am, and TWA to fly from Heathrow to designated gateways in the US. In 1991, Pan Am and TWA sold their rights to United Airlines and American Airlines, respectively, while Virgin Atlantic was added to the list of airlines allowed to operate on these routes. The Bermuda II Air Service Agreement was superseded by a new "open skies" agreement that the United States signed on 30 April 2007 and came into effect on 30 March 2008. Shortly afterwards, additional US airlines, including Northwest Airlines, Continental Airlines, US Airways and Delta Air Lines, started services to Heathrow after previously having to use Gatwick Airport. Following Brexit, the US and UK signed a new US-UK Air Transport Agreement in November 2020, incorporating the essential elements of Open Skies, which came into effect in March 2021.