Airport News
Below are news items relating to specific airports
Manchester’s £650m Airport City master plan unveiled
Manchester Airports Group has produced its plans for an 150 acre Airport City , close to Manchester Airport. In April 2011 Government announced that Manchester Airport would be one of the first four Enterprise Zones, with Airport City at the core of the zone. The Airport City (also elsewhere called an Aerotropolis) would be in two zones, one with hotel, office, retail and advanced manufacturing space, and the other focusingn on freight and logistics. MAG will submit a planning application within weeks for the scheme's main link road, with work set to start by spring and due for completion in 12-15 months. The rest of the building will take several years. MAG hopes to attract global businesses to work in their airport city, and create a project to compete with other locations in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Dusseldorf and Heathrow.
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Birmingham business leaders jubilant on HS2 – but rail link does not go to the airport
Birmingham believes it will benefit from the HS2 link. However, the rail link will not go to the airport, or even to the main rail station but under the plans, a new station will be built in Curzon Street, which is about a 15-minute walk from New Street Station. This is the so called interchange station which is on the other side of the M42 and will be linked to the airport and international station by a people mover of which we know little else but it could be a futuristic monorail or something similar ... Birmingham Friends of the Earth want money spent on transport within the city - what is the point in a super-fast link to London if it takes an hour to reach the station, across the suburbs?
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Campaign launched against £50bn Thames Estuary airport
A new campaign has been set up to oppose either Boris Island or Foster's Folly - the two options for airports in the Thames Estuary. Canvey town councillors are making preparations to join forces with parish councils in Kent to oppose the plans. Together they reckon they could be a very vociferous group. County councillor Ray Howard has put forward a motion to Essex County Council, to be discussed soon, on behalf of the town council opposing the estuary airport plans. There are many strong statements from a range of prominent people, showing their opposition to the plans.
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HACAN calls on Government to ditch for good outdated way of measuring aircraft noise
The UK government uses the Leq system to measure aircraft noise over a 16 hour day. The EU uses the Lden method to measure aircraft noise. This averages the noise out over a 12 hour day; then a 4 hour evening; and finally an 8 hour night. It adds 5 decibels to the evening level and 10 decibels to the night level to allow for the lower background noise levels at those times. This gives a more realistic measure. The EU estimates that around 720,000 people are disturbed by noise from Heathrow aircraft, while the UK Government puts it much lower at less than 300,000.
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Medway Council Cabinet meeting on opposition to estuary airport plans
Medway Council's Cabinet met on 20th December to discuss proposals for a huge airport in the Thames Estuary. The report to the Cabinet by Robin Cooper, Director of Regeneration, Community and Culture advised Members of the 3 current proposals for International Airports in Medway and Kent and recommends strong opposition to all the proposals. They give 10 good reasons for opposing the plans, and these include environmental destruction, adverse effects on homes, massive new house building covering swathes of the area in buildings, CO2 emission, fog and cost.
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Hong Kong airport authority says 3rd runway necessary
Hong Kong airport, which has two runways, wants to build a third as it says the two will be full by 2020. It claims this is needed to keep up with the rapid growth in air traffic. There has been a 3 month consultation. The runway would cost perhaps much more than $17 billion. Hong Kong overtook Memphis in 2010 as the world's busiest air cargo hub on the back of strong import and export growth in China. Critics are calling for a thorough environmental assessment before any decision is made, but time constraints will make such a report unlikely. WWF has questioned the project.
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Birmingham Airport hopes to offer cut price holiday escapes during Olympics
Another bit of opportunistic publicity from Birmingham Airport's Paul Kehoe. He uses the opening of a new hangar at the end of January to get some publicity for hopes of growing the number of passengers this year. More business jets. More tourists during the Olympics, on cheap deals to escape Britain during August. And of course, the usual swipe at APD ...
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Aircraft noise measurements over London ‘inaccurate and misleading’
HACAN East, the new group representing residents affected by London City Airport, says that the way the government currently measure aircraft noise over much of London is both inaccurate and misleading. Now that aircraft approaching Heathrow join the approach path much further to the east than they used to, residents affected by planes using London City Airport are also overflown by planes descending to Heathrow. But the noise data for flights using each airport are measured separately and not combined. This problem has been known since 2007, and recognized as underestimating the total noise heard by residents. If the noise levels are combined, aircraft noise levels in parts of East London matches those in West London
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Nicholas Faith: Boris Island must never be able to get off the ground
Nicholas Faith argues that an estuary airport is not needed. The cost would be vast and Lord Foster rather airily assumes the money could be raised internationally. The existence of 300,000 permanent resident birds on the banks of the estuary is decisive in itself. They now occupy five Special Protection Areas which could not be replaced by a man-made bird sanctuary. Another delusion is that we need a Very Major Airport to demonstrate that we are a Very Major Player on the world business scene. Too many Heathrow flights are short haul, and Heathrow should focus on long haul, leaving most of the short haul to the other London airports.
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Selling Heathrow won’t pay for a Thames airport
The advocates of an estuary airport hope that it could partly be funded by selling the land at Heathrow which they speculate might raise £12 billion. However, the reason that land round Heathrow is so valuable is because there’s an airport there: close it down and the value collapses. Freight in particular goes from Heathrow, and its location is key. Some 77,000 people work at Heathrow for 320 different companies and more than 200,000 have jobs that depend on it. Once the planes stop flying, it is just another brown-field site.