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Several committee members attended the latest Heathrow Consultation held on 24th Jan. A more detailed article will appear in the next Newsletter, but in the meantime the essential take-aways are summarised in the graphic shown, short-cutting the 26 consultation documents.
“Arrivals-1 for the northern runway”
This shows one of the most problematic proposed new arrivals flight paths “Arrivals-1 for the Northern runway” (used 75% of the time for early mornings), overlaid with a “heat map” of the Society’s membership. Make no mistake, the majority of members would be directly overflown at 2000-3000ft. The “Arrivals-2” option is worse for some members, with overflights between 2000-2500ft in the southern part of Hammersmith.
We urge you to respond to the online questionnaire answering “neither – prefer no expansion” to most questions, or use appropriate detailed responses largely the same as Chiswick’s, see: http://chatr.org.uk. You must do this by 4th March.
Currently, no Hammersmith residents are directly overflown, and those living North of King Street (the majority of our members) hear rather less of the early morning arrivals along the river that plague those living further South, particularly in TEAM mode between 6-7am as described here.
A major shortcoming of consultation – made clear to the organisers – was that the auralisation booths didn’t feature the sound of arrivals below 3000ft, only above 3000 and at 650ft, which is of course earsplitting, just before the runways. Nor did they try to simulate the new noise of aircraft banking relatively steeply from the North to make this proposed approach, and it is just this type of psycho-acoustical variation in tone caused by Doppler Effects and changes in direction that are most disturbing to the human ear.
In terms of the many other changes, Heathrow are looking at different forms of respite where a “late start” is 6am, 5.30am being their preferred timing! Obviously this is far too early for civilised living, and should be rejected. Current flight-paths and TEAM patterns are proposed to be replaced by IPA (“Independent Parallel Approaches”), partly as a result of improvements in Instrument Landing technologies which can happen regardless of any 3rd runway. ILS was previously quite limited, creating the longstanding arrivals corridor down the river – newer technology allows for a wider dispersion of approach patterns.
There are several other alarming features of the proposed changes as well as shortcomings of the consultation to be detailed in the forthcoming Newsletter.
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