Lord Adonis, Labour's short-lived transport secretary, admitted last week that he miscalculated in trying to push through a third runway at Heathrow. He took a gamble: he didn't think the Tories would "engage in a massive act of self-mutilation so far as the country was concerned". Had he not claimed it as a Labour project – had he punted it out to a review instead of letting it become an election issue – he believes they might be building it by now.

The coalition is certainly waiting and keeping stumm, but few in aviation would credit them with the level of strategy Adonis wishes he'd deployed. The sound of 737s taking off has barely masked the angry rumblings of the last few months – BAA pointing to the growth of rival hubs on the continent while Heathrow creaks at the seams; or Willie Walsh, the International Airlines Group (IAG) boss, denouncing the coalition from here to Beijing; or the general anguish at air passenger duty. The benefits of aviation to the nation rarely get any credit, the industry claims.

Capping it off is the complaint that the government won't even say what its plans are. A long overdue policy framework is promised for summer, as it was in spring. Tomorrow, the biggest players in aviation will line up again to press for clarity, stressing the billions in GDP that air links underpin, and unveiling their own four tests of whether coalition policy will work. It isn't, officially, Heathrow drum-banging. But the loudest voices are BAA's and IAG's, and the debate as they frame it only points one way.

To the dismay of environmentalists, who thought they had laid the third runway to rest in 2010, its spectral claws are scrabbling at the surface – Nightmare in Hounslow, part two. Like all good sequels, a new monster has been thrown into the mix: a Thames estuary airport that would mean roads, railways and buildings across the wetland habitats of thousands of protected birds – and supposedly sink the west London economy by ensuring Heathrow's demise.

Why? Because the new orthodoxy – animating many Conservatives and alarming some, like Zac Goldsmith, who saw stopping expansion as more than just a vote-winner – is that extra capacity can't be simply spread around: Britain needs one, bigger, hub, connecting enough passengers to make more and more routes financially feasible.

While the third runway is still officially off limits, David Cameron's response to a recent Commons question was equivocal enough to be seized on by campaigners in both camps. Many believe transport secretary Justine Greening – as MP for Putney, implacably opposed to the third runway – is likely to walk (or, as she might put it, "re-mode") to another ministry in an autumn reshuffle.

Dissenting voices question the big-hub thinking: Gatwick, now free from BAA, believes expansion could come its way, while Birmingham airport is promoting an alternative vision of a network of UK bases "to share the economic gain and environmental pain". But they all want to know where they stand, so they can begin working towards whatever future the government will allow.

As Adonis points out, the benefits – as with high speed rail or other infrastructure investments – would accrue in the long term for the nation, while the grief would be local and immediate. Politicians must weigh up peaceful skies against a faltering economy. And the business opportunities BAA, Walsh and co see going begging may be real, but so are the environmental costs, however much new aircraft models cut the noise and CO2.

Cameron has executed a few U-turns; a 180-degree course change on aviation would be little surprise. As one industry insider puts it: they accept there will be constraints, but they can't plan until they know what the parameters are going to be.

The four policy tests that aviation's coalition of the impatient will unveil tomorrow might as well be: do the Conservatives mean it; can they deliver it; will the other lot try to stop it; and will anything actually happen before our international competitors leave us stranded on the tarmac?

Interest-rate swaps give banks another chance to do the right thing

Banks and their morality – or lack thereof – were high on the agenda last week. The judge presiding over attempts to bar former bosses of the collapsed Christmas hamper company Farepak from acting as company directors made it clear that the behaviour of the bankers HBOS in the debacle was unlikely to be seen by the public as acceptable.

Expect more talk about the rights and wrongs of banking this week when the Financial Services Authority should announce the outcome of its initial look at the way high street banks sold interest rate swaps to small business customers in the runup to the financial crisis. These swaps were intended to help small business customers fix the interest rates on their loans at a time when there were fears rates would rise – only for them to be cut three years ago to historically low levels as the full force of the banking crisis hit.

The City regulator has been examining mis-selling claims to establish whether there is a widespread problem and when the result of the preliminary review is announced this week, it will lead to a full-blown investigation.

Martin Wheatley, who will lead the new Financial Conduct Authority when the FSA is disbanded next year, is expected to say there is no evidence of mis-selling on the scale of the payment protection insurance (PPI) scandal, which is costing the industry £9bn.

But he is also expected to say that there have been mistakes – he told MPs last week that banks had "questions to answer" about the way the products were sold, and there were cases of potential redress. In some instances, for example, the products had a longer lifespan than the loans themselves.

Wheatley has a lot to prove as he prepares to become the consumers' champion next year. But the banks have even more at stake. PPI ruined an already tarnished relationship with the banks' customers. For once, the banks should just do the moral thing and pay compensation where it is due.

NatWest loses some of its shine as computers say no

The timing of the computer meltdown at Royal Bank of Scotland, which left millions of customers strapped for cash, could not have been worse. With the crisis in the eurozone raising concerns about the strength of the banking system, the idea of a bank unable to provide even basic details of customer accounts is pretty chilling.

That is not to say that RBS is short of cash, of course. It is just that its computers could not show customers where their money was.

But, crucially, the majority of the customers affected by the systems nightmare banked with NatWest – a brand that until now had escaped the financial crisis almost unscathed.

Despite being owned by RBS throughout the crisis, keeping the two operations separate proved to be a shrewd move, as it meant NatWest was not tarred with the same brush as its bailed-out parent. Shame then that the brand – with its snappy advertising campaign and promise of emergency cash for customers losing their cards – has now been associated with such complete incompetence.