Aviation

Campaign date: 08-01-2008

In the last 20 years, air traffic in the UK has trebled. At the moment, there are 180 million passenger movements a year in the UK, and the Government is predicting 500 million per annum by 2030, with regional airports taking a significant share.

This growth will lead to more of the following:

• Climate change. Britain has signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, yet aviation seems exempt from any requirement to lower its greenhouse-gas emissions.

• Noise pollution. The noise of jet aircraft taking off or landing can destroy utterly the quality of life of those living near airports. Even several miles from airports, aircraft noise is loud enough to drown out birdsong, and provides a background drone which makes it impossible to feel that one has ‘got away from it all’.

• Air pollution. Air quality in England is getting worse. Its deterioration will accelerate if jet aviation is encouraged. Airport development also leads to a large increase in road-traffic volume, which in turn raises air pollution (as well as noise pollution and landscape damage).

• Economic damage. Although airports create jobs locally, in the wider sense there is considerable economic damage. England currently suffers a tourism deficit of more than £18 billion, with budget airlines carry many times more Britons going abroad than foreigners visiting Britain.

What this means for Kent:

Manston (Kent International Airport), near Ramsgate

Though there is little commercial passenger traffic from Manston at the moment, Kent County Council hopes to see up to six million passengers per annum (mppa) there in the future. KCC’s hopes are supported by the South East Plan.

The edge of Ramsgate is less than 1,500 metres from the runway at Manston, and the Victorian seaside town is directly beneath the airport’s landing flight path in prevailing weather conditions. Growth at Manston will make many people’s lives almost unbearable with aircraft noise, which will also severely affect Herne Bay, Margate, Broadstairs, Sandwich and Canterbury, as well as eroding tranquillity in the North Downs.

While growth would provide more employment at Manston, much of it would be highly specialised (pilots, engineers etc) who would probably come into the area from elsewhere. Jobs for locals would be in shorter supply. Noise from aircraft could also lead to loss of investment and existing jobs nearby. Airports create 400 (currently reducing towards 300) jobs per million passengers. At 6 mppa, Manston would lead to 1,800-2,400 jobs. How many, though, would be lost nearby, especially in Ramsgate, which relies on an appealing environment for a thriving tourist trade?

While a jet aircraft on a typical short-haul flight produces 0.17kg CO2 per passenger per km, a train travelling the same distance would lead to roughly 0.052 kg per passenger per km. Kent is the only place in Britain which has an international rail link. Given that trains produce roughly a third of the CO2 emissions per passenger of aircraft, and electric trains can be powered more in the future from renewable forms of energy, it seems ridiculous that the operators of Manston aspire to providing scheduled flights to continental Europe. Kent is already feeling the effects of low-cost travel as so many of those who used to go on holiday via the channel ports now fly from airports all across England. Kent must not contribute to the destruction of its ferry services and rail link by encouraging aviation.

It is not only the prospective effects of aircraft activity at Manston that have caused disquiet for CPRE Kent: development has taken place there outside the planning system – a toothless Section 106 Agreement exercising no real control – and the airport’s growth must be brought back under the remit of town planning law. Ideally, any significant expansion of operations at Manston would be subject to the scrutiny of a public inquiry.

Aircraft have used Manston since 1915, and it still provides east Kent with an excellent diversionary airfield, as well as a good base for pleasure flying and tuition. CPRE Kent has never campaigned for the airfield to be shut down, but an airport so close to thousands of residents – and so far from public transport – must not be allowed to grow without strict control. The quality of life of everyone in Thanet depends on it.

Lydd (London Ashford Airport), on Romney Marsh

In March 2007, CPRE published up-to-date, county-scale tranquillity maps for the whole of England. The Kent version showed clearly that Romney Marsh was the largest relatively tranquil part of the county – nowhere else is at as easy to feel that one has ‘got away from it all’. It is typical of modern Kent, however, that the peace and quiet of the Marsh is under threat from a major development proposal – one which seems shockingly ill-conceived, and which threatens to damage and degrade everything that makes the Marsh special.

The owners of Lydd Airport (officially named London Ashford Airport, or LAA) have submitted two planning applications to Shepway District Council. One is to build a new passenger terminal, the other is to extend the airport’s existing Tarmac runway by 444 metres. With the extension allowing the runway to take fully loaded, short-haul jet airliners such as the Boeing 737, the developers hope LAA will become a regional airport handling, in the medium term, two million passengers per annum (2 mppa).

There are many reasons why Lydd should not become a regional airport. It is less than two miles from a nuclear power station (at Dungeness), and hemmed in by two of the country’s most sophisticated MoD firing ranges (at Hythe and Dungeness), all of which have over-flying restrictions. There are areas of international, national and local nature conservation importance close to – and immediately adjacent to – the airport runway. The runway extension would completely destroy part of the Dungeness Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and cause significant damage to the Pett Levels Special Protection Area (SPA) and the Dungeness Special Area of Conservation (SAC). There are also 240 hectares (590 acres) of open-water bird sites within five kilometres of the airport, with one site alone – the Dungeness Gravel Pits – described by the RSPB as supporting ‘an average of 14,000 wintering birds’. For the airport to operate safely, ‘bird-hazard-management’ (bird scarers) will have to be widely used, which will, in effect, make large areas off limits to these birds.

People, as well as wildlife, will suffer from Lydd’s development. Tranquillity will be lost all across the Marsh and in the Kent Downs AONB, for even at 10,000 feet an airliner will drown out birdsong, adding an overlay of mechanical racket to the normal sounds of the countryside. For those in the airport’s flight path, though, the noise implications are far more serious. Aircraft on approach to Lydd during prevailing winds will follow the beam of an Instrument Landing System (ILS) which brings them over Hythe, Dymchurch, New Romney, Littlestone and St Mary’s Bay at hundreds, rather than thousands, of feet. Aircraft taking off to the west will have to make a sharp right turn, on full power, directly over the village of Lydd.

Proponents of airport development often argue that nearby residents are aware they live near an airport and should therefore expect that there will be noise. This is misleading, though: a single-engined Cessna on approach – the usual background noise for Lydd – is not practically comparable to a fully loaded 737, trailing kerosene fumes as it comes grinding in over the chimney pots of Greatstone-on-Sea. And the local economy will suffer along with quality of life: tourism, which provides one in four jobs on the Marsh, will be vital to the area’s future – yet who will want to stay directly under the flight path of a major regional airport?

If Lydd is allowed to expand, noise and air pollution will come from surface traffic as well as from aircraft. Lydd, remote from major highways and railways, is reached by small roads, some of which are acknowledged even by LAA as ‘currently operating at near capacity much of the time’. The airport owners acknowledge that 90% of passengers would travel to Lydd by car, and 95% of staff. The airport’s rail connections are dismal: the Environmental Statement which accompanied the planning applications suggested taking the train from Ashford to Rye (23 minutes, one train per hour) then a 13-mile taxi ride to the airport.

Lydd Airport’s planning applications are almost certain to be called in for public inquiry by central government. When that happens, we will send in the eight pages of comments we submitted to Shepway in March 2007. Our opposition will be echoed by the RSPB and two local protest groups, and also by the South East England Regional Assembly, which has called for a halt to airport expansion across the South East. Support for the scheme is looking shaky, with only the district council and KCC lending significant official endorsement. We fervently hope the secretary of state sees that only one course of action is feasible: stopping this terrible proposition in its tracks.

Attachments:

Campaign Issues

• Lydd Airport
• Lower Thames Crossing
• Boris Island Airport