Farnborough on a Friday afternoon

For a site that trades on speed, the road connection is more consequential than any feature of the airfield. What Farnborough has is a good motorway a few minutes away and a set of destinations that mostly lie along it. What it does not have is any way of shortening the last part of a journey into central London, which uses the same congested approaches as everything else coming in from the south west.

The airfield sits close to the M3 corridor, which puts London within a straightforward run and the south coast within an easy one. Into central London the M3 becomes the A316 and then a series of decisions about how to cross the river, and that last part is where the time goes.

Westward, toward Basingstoke, Winchester and Southampton, it is a clean motorway journey. Eastward toward Guildford and the Surrey Hills it is A-road work and slower than the map suggests.

Business aviation is heavily weighted toward the end of the week, and so is everybody else’s travel. That coincidence produces the airfield’s most predictable difficulty: the movements peak at exactly the hour when the roads around it are least willing to cooperate, and it happens every week without anybody ever quite planning for it.

Anyone who drives the M3 regularly knows what it does between four and seven on a Friday. A departure from Farnborough at that hour heading toward London is fighting the general exodus in the opposite direction, which helps, but an arrival heading west is not.

Building the extra time in is not pessimism. It is the difference between arriving with the client relaxed and arriving with the client watching a clock.