Focus: New plan revealed for flight-path Britain
Labour wants to cut CO2 emissions but it is also pursuing a dramatic expansion of Britain’s airways. Can the circle be squared?
Jonathan Leake and Richard Sadler 11th February 2007 Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1364880.ece
‘Sod them, let’s fly,” shouted full-page advertisements in several newspapers last week - and, for a moment at least, thousands of readers were taken in.
Under the headline, “Flying, your patriotic duty”, a fictitious businessman called Sir Montgomery Cecil railed against the “miserable” green lobby and urged us to “enjoy ourselves and keep on flying”. Far from cutting back, we should aim to fly more “since many destinations might soon become uninhabitable”.“I’m bored of the tofu mafia and their climate change hysterics”, added Cecil. “I didn’t fight in two world wars to see communist liberals tell me, or my shareholders, what to do.”
The adverts were, of course, a spoof, designed to shock consumers into action and to lampoon the (fast dwindling) number of people who either don’t believe in or don’t care about climate change.
Unfortunately, Cecil’s adverts appear to have been missed or perhaps even taken literally by the government. Evidence of its intention to allow aviation to expand on a massive scale is provided in a document leaked to The Sunday Times from Nats, the company that emerged from National Air Traffic Services and now manages Britain’s air traffic control systems.
It wants to restructure Britain’s existing air corridors and add new ones in preparation for a doubling of the number of flights over the UK from 2.4m a year today to almost 5m by 2030. A confidential aeronautical map drawn up by Nats points to sharp increases in the number of aircraft using the 15 or so air corridors that criss-cross Britain, and the creation of several new flight paths and six new stacking areas where aircraft fly in circles while waiting for landing slots.
The terms of Nats’s licence from the Civil Aviation Authority, the industry regulator, require it “to be capable of meeting, on a continuing basis, any reasonable level of overall demand” and to “permit access to airspace on the part of all users”.
If approved, Nats’s plans would mean hundreds of thousands of people - perhaps millions - suffering from aircraft noise where there was little or none before. They would also turn the aviation industry into one of Britain’s biggest generators of greenhouse gases.
It is the kind of proposal that would delight Cecil but which leaves his creator, Peter Myers, a former City financier turned environment campaigner, spitting blood.
“Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us we had a maximum of 10 years to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Myers last week. “The government promised to make reductions but all the time it has been planning the biggest aviation expansion the industry has ever seen. It is pure hypocrisy.”
The clash between green campaigners such as Myers and the aviation industry illustrates the conundrum that policy makers face around the world.
On the one hand, flying has become integral to our lives and our economy and is something most of us aspire to do more of. On the other, climate change, fuelled by flying, could contribute to the destruction not just of our own environment but of the destinations we want to fly to.
For people such as Tim Smith, a father of two from Suffolk, Britain’s booming aviation sector presents more immediate concerns. His plight illustrates what could lie in store for hundreds of thousands of people across central England if Nats’s plans are given the go-ahead.
Smith was looking for a peaceful corner of England in which to bring up his children and moved to the hamlet of Cornard Tye in 1999. “One of the best things about this area was that you could sit in the garden and hear birds singing,” he said.
“Then one day I was sitting in my office at home when I heard a plane going over, then another and then another. When I rang the Civil Aviation Authority and asked what had happened they told me the air corridors had been changed.
“We now get easyJets and Ryanairs one after another. Some fly so low we can see the wheels and the people inside, but even when they’re flying higher, at five or six thousand feet, the noise is very loud.
“I've effectively had a motorway put over my head. No one was told about it, no one has been consulted and there is no compensation - but it has completely ruined what I moved here for and now we want to move.”
Many more Britons could soon find themselves in the Smiths’ shoes. The leaked Nats report states that the forecast increase in air traffic “is not manageable within current airspace”. It goes on to propose new stacking areas, each covering up to 50 square miles, over north Essex, Suffolk, Kent, Dorset and around the borders of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
A stacking area is designated airspace where aircraft waiting to land can circle at 8,000ft-12,000ft while waiting to land. The proposed new stacking areas would feed into Stansted, Luton and London City airports.
A significant new flight path is also proposed over Cambridgeshire and Essex to ease air traffic congestion for Stansted and Luton. Nats also wants a second new flight path to run northwest from Cambridgeshire through Northamptonshire, Rutland, Leicester, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and heavier use of existing flight paths over Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, the West Midlands, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire.
The map and documents are early drafts and likely to undergo many amendments before publication as part of a public consultation due to start this year. However, the issue at hand - that Britain needs more air corridors to soak up aviation growth - is not going to go away any time soon.
“We are looking at 3%-4% growth a year,” said Simon Hocquard, Nats’s general manager for air traffic strategy. “We are seeing 2.4m aircraft movements a year now and that is likely to reach 3m by 2012 with continued growth after that. Our priority, above all else, is air safety and these measures are designed with that in mind.”
Steve Charlish, a commercial pilot who has led a campaign against increasing air traffic over the East Midlands, said: “If Nats were proposing a new motorway or bypass you could object but one thing you cannot do is touch the airspace above because that is owned by the crown - you’ve got no right of objection.”
Nats is, however, merely implementing an expansion policy drawn up by the government and set out in its 2003 aviation white paper. In it, Labour announced that it wanted to see new runways built at Stansted, Heathrow, Birmingham and Edinburgh. It also proposed increasing capacity at numerous other airports including Coventry, Doncaster, Lydd, near Dover, Kent International at Manston, Bristol and Wolverhampton. Overall, about 40 airports were given the go-ahead to expand.
Air travel has already increased fivefold over the past 30 years, with 216m passengers entering or leaving Britain in 2005. By 2030 that number is expected to grow to 470m a year.
The results can be seen all over the country. At Lydd, on the Dungeness peninsula in Kent, the owners of a small, private airfield have submitted plans for a new regional airport taking up to 2m passengers a year by 2015. BAA, the owner of seven British airports including Heathrow, plans to expand capacity at Southampton from 1.9m to 6m passengers a year by 2030.
Robin Hood airport in South Yorkshire, which opened at an old RAF base near Doncaster in 2005, is planning to fly to 40 destinations and to increase its passenger capacity from 1m to 2.3m.
Noise pollution is one thing. But how will such expansion affect greenhouse gas emissions? The Department for Transport claims that Britain’s aviation industry generates about 32m tons of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to almost 5% of Britain’s total annual emissions of 670m tons.But, as ever, the statistics tell only half the story. When calculating aircraft emissions, the department counts only flights out of Britain, not those coming in. This would be fair if only half the passengers were British but, in fact, the total is about 70%.
You then have to consider “radiative forcing” - the phenomenon whereby greenhouse gases emitted at high altitudes have about three times more impact on global climate than those emitted at ground level. Put all these factors together and aviation in Britain is generating a greenhouse gas warming effect roughly five times greater than the transport department’s figure of 32m tons suggests. By 2030 that will have risen to the equivalent of 400m tons, say critics.
Such statistics would not cut much ice with Sir Montgomery Cecil. “As a businessman I have shareholders to think about, but these yoghurt-peddlers won’t shut up about the poor and starving who don’t even fly,” he raved.
“Even our prime minister says we should keep flying. His carbon footprint is 800 times more than the average person’s. Now that is what I call leadership.”
Flying: the facts
- Aviation is the world's fastest-growing form of transport. The number of passengers passing through Britain’s airports alone rose from 32m in 1970 to 216m last year.
- More than half the British population now fly at least twice a year
- British airports are a global success story with around 20% of all international passengers using UK airports
- In 2001 aviation contributed £13 billion to Britain’s gross domestic product – about 2% of the total
- British aviation employs 200,000 people directly and another 600,000 depend on it indirectly
- Aviation now generates about 64m tons of greenhouse gases a year, including landings and take-offs
- Emissions at altitude have about three times the impact of those at ground level
- About 4% of Britons report being very annoyed by aircraft noise – equivalent to 2.4m people
- About 22% of Britons, equivalent to 13m people, report having their sleep interrupted by aircraft noise
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1364880.ece