By Tom Anderson
Kirkstall residents have expressed their concerns over Leeds Bradford Airport’s new proposal to change night-time flight rules.
LBA have hosted a series of public meetings in communities surrounding the airport, aiming to open a public forum to discuss future plans to ‘be a sustainable business and good neighbour’.
Last week, a large number of residents attended the Kirkstall meeting where they voiced their resistance to the new changes proposed by CEO Vincent Hodder.
At the meetings – including one in Horsforth – Mr Hodder has outlined the airport’s roadmap and commitment to becoming a net zero carbon airport by the end of 2030.
But at this meeting, he confirmed that LBA had sent an initial briefing document proposing a section 73 planning application, as reported by the BBC.
This comes after a public inquiry published in July dismissed two of three appeals from the airport over a council decision to restrict night time flights.
The new proposals included decreasing the period classed as night time from 11pm-7am to 11.30pm-6am, increasing the daytime period by 90 minutes when there are no restrictions on the number of take-offs.
Mr Hodder confirmed that the proposals would also seek to abolish the existing cap on the number of night-time flights allowed each year. With the existing fleet of aircrafts, the licence permits 2,920 in the summer and 1,200 in the winter season. The proposals would replace this cap with an annual noise ‘quota count’.
Condition 6a of the existing licence permits only aircrafts falling within QC 0.5 and 1 for night-time arrivals (11pm-7am) and those within only the QC of 0.5 for departure in the same period.
Mr Hodder said that the proposed licence change would allow for more modern, environmentally cleaner and quieter aircrafts, with a QC lower than 0.5, such as the Boeing 737-MAX (QC 0.25) or the Airbus A230 NEO (QC 0.125), to operate at during the night-time period, reducing the average noise.
He said: “The expectation will be that overall, by 2030, there will be more flights at night than we have today.
“In the change of rules what we’re saying is that by 2030 we won’t be able to operate the aircrafts that operate today, we will have to operate the quieter aircrafts.
“There will be more individual noise events, but if the difference between those two aircrafts is 10dB, that is for a lot of people, that will be enough to drop below the threshold that wakes them up in the middle of the night.
“If I can drop that by even 10dB for people under the flightpath, that is a material difference.”
A fleet comprised of quieter aircrafts with lower QC ratings would need greater number of arrivals and departures to reach the annual noise quota. This would allow a substantial increase in the number of nighttime flights and enable the number of passengers travelling through the airport to increase from 4.m to 7m per year.
Hodder also said that the initial proposals included the funding of a ‘noise mitigation scheme’, which would mean that residents living within the noise contour proposed in the 2020 application, would be included in the scheme.
Residents at the meeting argued that the current frequency of aircraft movements overnight is already too high and that a funding scheme would not change anything.
A concerned local said: “You cannot have the windows open in summer even when it’s hot, it disturbs your sleep so much and we have triple glazing. It’s not that we haven’t made precautions for it.”
In response to LBA’s Net Zero roadmap, another resident said: “Nobody can predict the future but we make our best estimates based on science. It just seems like getting all the figures from the aviation industry, they’re bound to be very optimistic and those projections just look to me, very unrealistic.”
Tensions rose between the CEO and the attendees, with the latter feeling as if their concerns were not being given proper weight.
Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA) have long campaigned against the airport’s expansion, citing noise and environmental concerns.
Nick Hodgkinson, Chair of GALBA, he said: “Mr Hodder talks about quieter planes being in use by 2030. That’s welcome but he doesn’t talk about the vastly increased frequency of noise, from thousands more take-offs and landings that would disturb peoples’ sleep and damage their health.
“It is very unlikely that all the planes in use at LBA by 2030 would be QC0.125. Even if they were, it is unlikely that there would be a 10db drop in noise per plane. The increased frequency of noise events, from the increased number of planes taking off and landing, would more than outweigh any reduction in noise from newer planes.
“They have not yet said what the noise quota count level would be. Based on their 2020 application, which also proposed a noise quota count to replace the cap, we estimate it would allow over 8,000 night flights a year – double the current number.
“Everyone wants quieter, more fuel-efficient planes at LBA. But even in five to ten years time, those planes will still only be a minority of LBA’s night flights.
“That’s why GALBA says Leeds City Council must keep the cap on the total number of flights allowed at night, as well as LBA introducing quieter plans. It’s not an ‘either/or’ choice – we need both a cap and newer planes.
“GALBA will fight LBA all the way, as we have before, and we will win, as we have before.”
The meeting was held at Kirkstall St Stephen’s C of E Primary School on Monday, 3 November.
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Time for the council and Mayor to hold a referendum on whether Yorkshire should have an airport. The group AGAINST the airport can then put their concerns ( aka Wingeing) to the test. and rest of us can vote YES and get the boot off the neck of those trying to bring the region into the 21st century!