Battersea Heliport

It is incredible,” says David McRobert, group MD of PremiAir Aviation, the current owners of Battersea Heliport in London, “that a financial centre as important as London, has only one place where you can land a helicopter. And that even that heliport is restricted to 12,000 movements (6,000 landings) a year.”

He has a point: Issy-le-Moulineaux in Paris has around 15,000 take-offs and landings a year. Sao Paulo in Brazil has 120 heliports, as mapped by Google Earth. Yet London, which wants to be the most important financial centre in the world, has only the one heliport and the most appalling road and rail infrastructure...