Sir, Peter Styles (August 9 ) mentions a new Midlands airport near Rugby proposed in a 2003 consultation paper, which was subsequently rejected. This airport would, if it were ever built, only be completed 25 years in the future.

The Roskill commission, which was the most thorough ever to look into the country’s airport problems, recommended 30 years ago that a new airport should be built on the site of an old Second World War airfield at Cublington, Buckinghamshire. This site, if the proposal had been adopted, would now be in operation, located on a direct line between London and Birmingham, close to Milton Keynes, a key expansion area. It would also be on the line for the long overdue high-speed rail link between London, Birmingham and the North.

Airports and their transport links need 25 to 30 years to plan and build, and today’s problems are the result of the wrong decisions taken 30 years ago.

CLIFF BISHOP, Bishops Stortford, Herts

Sir, A third runway at Heathrow will only improve safety (letters, August 11 ) until it, too, becomes dangerously overcrowded – at which point safety will be used to justify calls for a fourth.

The same approach is frequently used to justify new road building, and “reduce congestion”, except that, as a report from the Government’s Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment confirmed as long ago as 1995, building new capacity soon generates more traffic, (vide the M25).

The reality with road and airport capacity is that we either stop now, or cause more damage and stop later: the evidence on climate change suggests that “later” will be too late.

DAVID GORDON, Allowenshay, Somerset

Sir, From my years as an Essex reporter, in the 1960s, I recall that the decisive veto on building a new London airport at Foulness in the Thames Estuary came not from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (letter, August 9 ) but from the War Department.

This used to be a most-secret muddy peninsula for testing explosives that included free-fall bombs, nuclear detonators, mines, missiles, rocketry and uranium-tipped shells. These toys have since gone into service, been put back in their box, or taken elsewhere. Vast numbers of birds used to have no problem with the whooshes and bangs but seem to have subsequently all but disappeared as a result of decades of overfishing in the North Sea.

RODNEY LEGG, Wincanton, Somerset

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