The London Assembly Environment Committee commented that the noise levels were unacceptable for residents living near Heathrow and city airports. Plans for Heathrow’s third runway should be scrapped and air traffic at key London airports should be completely stopped.
Plans for the third runway at Heathrow will be scraped entirely, among other measures proposed by the London Assembly is the ban on night flights and ‘strengthening’ the restrictions around early morning flights.
Further, there are proposal for rotating flight paths and route designing that minimize noise by avoiding ‘stacking’ low-level and flying overlapping paths.
By passenger number London is the world capital of aviation and the city airports handle more than 150 million passengers a year which is ahead of New York and Tokyo.
In 2018, both Heathrow and City handled a record number of passengers and last year eighty million passengers passed through the West London airport which was up by 2.7 per cent. At the City Airport in 2018 the passenger numbers grew by 6.4 per cent.However, Heathrow wants to add an extra 68 flights a day.
Caroline Russell AM, chair of the Environment Committee stated that the experiences of residents living with the daily nightmare of overhead noise is deeply worrying. Due to the an inability to sleep, relax and concentrate there are several health impacts.
Aircraft noise is a dominating intrusion for many and the drive towards filling airspace capacity must be checked. It isn’t right and must be challenged and not an acceptable price to pay for air travel.
The aviation authorities must priorities the health and well-being of Londoners and they were clear of the objection to the expansion of Heathrow.
There was an eight-week consultation on the proposed expansion earlier this month.
