For evil it certainly is for thousands of people who live nearby who will lose their homes and, in all likelihood, for many more who live under the current flight path that's certain to get busier. Anyone who's ever taken a plane from Heathrow knows that a 45 minute delay is almost mandatory, so clearly more runway capacity would benefit passengers. And the new rail hub transport minister Andrew Adonis is promising would be of wide benefit. But could the rail hub substitute for a new runway or could the runway be built somewhere else, like Gatwick? The rail hub could certainly take care of some capacity although you would still get a runway logjam; Gatwick is a credible alternative that, one suspects, hasn't been properly analysed. As London expands to the east, a process that will be speeded by the 2012 Olympics, Gatwick and, to the north, Stansted arguably have more to offer than Heathrow. The Government will announce today that the third runway goes ahead although the Tories, still the likeliest winners of the next election, are saying they'll stop it and numerous others, like Greenpeace, will pour a tidal wave of legal challenges over the project. Down the line there might be wider support for London mayor Boris Johnson's notion of building a new Hong Kong-style airport in the Thames Estuary. So, to answer the question posed above, er, don't know really.