What precisely are the misleading aspects of Heathrow’s self publicity and response to complaints?
If you do complain you may get a response like: “We appreciate that early-morning flights can be disturbing for local residents and Heathrow is continuously finding ways to reduce aircraft noise. For example, we provide a strong financial incentive for airlines to use the quietest planes available, including in the early-morning period, through the use of variable landing charges.”
One response has to be: ‘You would not know it’! The eight planes that arrived between 920am and 930am on Sunday 5th October completely ruined a beautiful sunny morning. They were all the largest type and flying at the lowest possible elevation.
Why would these airlines be bothered? Easyjet might benefit but it is dishonest and disingenuous of Heathrow and their ‘Customer Relations’ to suggest that financial incentives make any difference to the global airlines.
And the searches I have been able to make do not provide information about noise.
What would be really useful is to have someone in the know to provide honest information. Any air traffic controllers out there?
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Hear hear (pun intended)! The noise when they are on the southern approach is relentless for those of us in Sheen – and further west presumably.
The earlier fights seem to be increasing in frequency too. It seems that as humans we are expected to grin and bear it, but if we were an endangered species it would be a different story! Can we find any links to aircraft noise damaging the natterjack toad’s breeding habits, for example? I know that Richmond Park’s SSSI status is being mentioned but does LHR even care about that?
Is there a similar pressure group in Richmond we can link up with? What are they doing in this regard?
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HACAN is the only organisation I know of but they seem to be quite quiet at the moment and probably more focussed on flight paths and the third runway. The other difficulty is that volunteer organisations tend to get ground down by wealthy companies who can pay their staff huge salaries to ensure they can ignore local communities. A comparable example is the Mortlake Brewery Community Group which did such a good job fighting the undesirable aspects of the Stag development – and they still lost to a single-minded council and wealthy developers. Or perhaps not so wealthy as they are now looking to sell their interest.
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We’ve known for years it’s always a case of Big Business Wins. They have no concept of disturbance levels, may care more if they lived under the flightpaths. And you’re right: their responses are always the standard ones, mean absolutely nothing.
There needs to be a strong organised campaign against this disruption.
Our MP claims to be involved in objections, but she’s SO weak and never actually achieves anything, with flights or any other issue.
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Yes it would certainly be interesting to know if any Heathrow employees actually live under a flightpath!
To be fair to our local MP she has limited power to actually achieve anything on a national scale, as a member of a minority party, whether it be in relation to Heathrow or Hammersmith Bridge.
As a separate problem any politicking she does is under the unbrella of the Lib Dems and seeking to gain support for that Party. By no means everyone locally wants to be seen as supporting that or any specific political group. That is one of the raison d’etre of EastSheenMatters.
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