Airport Growth and Changing Flight Paths over Forest Hill

We continue to follow the latest plans for expansion at London City and Heathrow airports, looking particularly at how the noise of more aircraft may affect our overflown community.

While Heathrow is once again looking towards growth through a third runway this would be many years away. So meanwhile we continue to attend the regular meetings of their Noise and Community Forum, where community groups review noise and environmental developments with the airport, the Department of Transport (DfT) and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), aiming to ensure that community interests are not completely overwhelmed by the industry’s drive for growth.

image from Wikimedia

A new body, the UK Airspace Design Service, is currently being formed by the DfT and CAA to take charge of a huge national project - redesign of airspace and flight paths of all UK  airports, starting with London and the South East. Forest Hill Society and Lewisham Council both put strong representations into the consultation, asking that community interests are represented in the overseeing Board of UKADS by a body such as the Aviation Environment Federation.

Separate to this London City has applied to the CAA to introduce new, lower arrivals flight paths so that larger and heavier aircraft can fly their routes which include the current arrivals path at around 2000ft across Sidcup/Catford/Forest Hill/Dulwich. In mid July we spent a morning with them going through the plans and highlighting the potential impacts over our area and also under all their routes across East London. They are required to follow a complex planning and consultation process specified by the CAA. We will continue to follow progress closely and make responses where required.

The new arrivals paths would be at a lower approach angle than at present, and so aircraft would be lower directly to the east and west of the runway on final approach. The immediately obvious impacts will be to residents around the Royal Docks and Thamesmead.

The new lower approach path with bigger jets will enable the airport to expand passenger numbers and flight numbers faster and introduce more destinations. It would introduce much larger capacity aircraft, initially the A320neo used widely by budget airlines like WizzAir and easyJet and which will be far heavier, fly lower and potentially be louder than the other new generation aircraft used at the airport. We are pressing them to produce a widespread consultation explaining all noise and other community impacts of these changes in terms that we can all understand.

We have also asked for operational trials with widespread real world noise measurement so that the consultation is absolutely clear on the frequency of overflight and levels of noise in summer and winter as these larger aircraft pass over different areas of London. In last year’s public inquiry, where we successfully opposed expansion of their operating hours, we used Horniman Gardens as one of our key local examples. We have agreed to host a small group from the airport there soon so we can hear and discuss the existing local aircraft noise together. There will be a public consultation, expected in the New Year.

Finally, as members of the Aviation Environment Federation the Society has been asked to mention the No Airport Expansion campaign, which is currently promoting a petition which can be found at Stop airport expansion: halt all airport expansion plans across the UK - Petitions

Tim Walker, John Doherty