Heathrow Airport has slipped its third-runway target from 2035 to roughly 2039, The Guardian reported on September 27, 2026, after airport chiefs said the original operations deadline is no longer achievable. The hub still aims to secure planning permission by 2029 and then open the new runway "within a decade," a timeline that would push first operations four years later than ministers once advertised.
The £33 billion project would raise Heathrow's annual flight cap from 480,000 to as many as 756,000 movements. Making room for the runway means demolishing hundreds of homes, diverting rivers, and putting a section of the M25 into a tunnel. Heathrow says the expansion is 100 percent privately financed, would support on the order of 100,000 jobs, and would unlock capacity for about forty airlines that want new or thicker services through the UK's main hub.
Political cover looks thinner than the concrete plans. Asked at Labour's conference in Liverpool whether he backed the runway, Andy Burnham called the issue "contested" and "principally a matter for London and London MPs," declining to jump ahead of a summer public consultation. Friends of the Earth argued that a four-year slip makes an already dubious economic case weaker, while the No 3rd Runway Coalition said Londoners would bear more noise and air pollution if the project proceeds.
Union leaders pushed the other way. GMB London regional secretary Warren Kenny said every year of delay is a year of apprenticeships and contracts lost, and urged the government to clear planning bottlenecks for an expected 108,000 jobs. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham tied the runway to unionized work and a market for UK steel. Heathrow itself said ambitious targets were right, that planning permission by 2029 remains the focus, and that benefits begin as soon as construction and supply-chain spending start.
Government analysis published earlier in the summer complicates the growth story. A Department for Transport paper found that airports elsewhere in England and Wales could lose millions of passengers if Heathrow expands, and further work suggested the national economic boost could be smaller than ministers hoped while local health effects could be "major adverse." Officials say there is no live planning application yet and that they will not prejudice the consultation, while still calling the original timeline ambitious.
For airlines, a 2039 opening is distant enough that fleet and slot plans will keep using today's two-runway constraints for more than a decade. For communities under the final approach paths, the slip is either relief or a longer fight, depending on which side of the consultation they sit. The National Policy Statement process still has to clear parliamentary scrutiny, and Heathrow has already signaled another public consultation later in 2026 before any Development Consent Order filing. The concrete fact from the weekend is simpler: Heathrow is no longer promising 2035, and the next hard gate is a 2029 planning decision.
Sources: The Guardian; Heathrow Airport statements and Department for Transport analysis as reported by The Guardian.
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