zanim powolasz sie na Heathrow cz. 2

[Gość: jacek]

Tuesday January 25, 2005
The Guardian

The expansion of Britain's airports will bring a huge increase in air
traffic - and further misery to the people who live in their shadow. So what
is life like on Britain's noisiest streets, with seven jets roaring overhead
every 10 minutes? Lucy Mangan packs her earplugs and heads for west London


There are a number of reasons why you might object in principle to the
prospect of further airport expansion in Britain. You might point out that
this overcrowded isle barely has enough room for Mrs Trellis's new
conservatory, let alone for the board, lodging and servicing of the projected
16 million extra passengers a year that the new terminal at Heathrow will
have coming through its controversial portals alone.
You could object to subsidising it. Airlines pay no fuel tax, a concession
that costs the Treasury £6bn a year, nor VAT on ticket sales, which
undermines the government's claims about the industry's vital importance to
the health of the country's economy (as does the fact that we fly out more
tourists than we fly in, at a net cost to the hospitality industry).
Or you could go down the environmental route. Even if expansion did
unquestionably benefit the national economy, it would be doing so at huge
cost to the global ecology. There will be an estimated half a billion air
travellers in the UK by 2030, producing an extra 60 million tonnes of carbon
emissions.
Then you could factor in the fumes produced by the generally congested roads
funnelling passengers to and from the airports and ask how we are going to
satisfy imminent EU legislation on air and noise pollution if the government
continues with the "predict and provide" strategy it currently clings to
(despite its dismal record as a policy in relation to the roads) rather than
finding ways of managing demand.
But if you live anywhere near a flight-path, there is one factor that counts
above all others. The noise. The ceaseless, oppressive, inescapable, all-but-
unbearable noise of planes flying overhead. At first I thought the people I
spoke to were, if not exactly exaggerating, perhaps oversensitive to the
problem after living with it for so long. That was before I went to spend 24
hours in Cranford, which is just beside Heathrow, with one of its oldest
inhabitants, 75-year-old Lorna Newman. She remembers when it was all fields
round here. "And the occasional smallholding and an orchard," she adds, as we
drive down the dual carriageway past the Ramada Jarvis hotel.
As I step off the bus from Hounslow West tube station at 7.30pm, I am too
busy consulting my map to remember where I am. So for quite a few seconds I
am stupidly bewildered by the enormous roaring sound that comes up behind me,
and keeps coming. And keeps coming. I look up and see an enormous plane
thunder overhead. It is an undeniably magnificent sight, but a truly
horrendous noise. It seems to fill my brain from the bottom up, so that by
the time it is directly above me I am no longer even capable of making the
strangulated "What the f-!?" cries I had been managing as the thing
approached. I can only stand with my shoulders hunched up to my ears, heart
racing, waiting for it to pass, willing the noise to be over.
In the quarter of an hour it takes me to find Lorna's house, a number of
(fractionally quieter) planes also sweep across the sky and my nerves are
jangling by the time I stumble across her threshold into the relatively
peaceful sanctuary offered by her triple-glazed home and heavy curtains. At 8
o'clock, we set off for the pub. By this point I am tensing up every time I
hear a car coming, because it sounds very much like the very beginnings of an
aircraft approach and I instinctively begin to hunker down each time. The pub
has music playing loud enough to drown out the planes that are landing only
yards away. At 9pm we head for Waye Avenue, which gets the full impact of
fligh-path noise. Three planes go over in as many minutes, seven in the 10
minutes I can stand it before I have to retreat to the car again. I
experiment with putting my gloved fingers in my ears. The curious and
irritating effect is to cut out the ambient noise (including the constant
rumble of earthbound planes taxiing on the runways and refuelling) and
highlight the periodic overhead cacophony. At a distance of 17 miles from
Heathrow, planes can hit more than 70 decibels. The government deems a noise
of 57 decibels as constituting "significant community annoyance". My
interviewees, I am beginning to realise, have in fact been models of
understatement.
Librarian Cheryl Hounslow lives - where else? - in Hounslow under a Heathrow
flight path with her husband and two children. "The worst thing for the kids
is that when we're walking to school, we can't chat," she says. "It's just
not worth the effort of trying to make ourselves heard. The school is under
the flight path too. It was really bad before they had insulation but I'm
sure they also don't spend as much time out of doors as they should, as they
would if it was quieter." She - and indeed everyone I speak to - talks about
how awful it is to have to keep the many-glazed windows shut night and day
throughout the summer, and of the impossibility of enjoying the
garden. "There are planes coming over every minute. If I'm about to go
outside and I hear one coming, I just don't because it's just so horrible."
Artist Julia Lambert lives just behind Putney Common under one flight path
and close to another. "People are staggered by how noisy it is even this far
away," she says. "If you try and have lunch outside, it's impossible to keep
up a conversation."
And the noise continues after dark. The night flights at Heathrow have been
an enormous bone of contention between Hounslow residents and the government
for years. The Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (Hacan)
won a historic victory in 2001 when the European Court ruled that they
breached the right to an uninterrupted night's sleep and banned them, but the
decision was overturned on appeal. Now the flights are supposed to stop
between 11.30pm and 4am but whenever I mention this it is greeted with hollow
laughter. Certainly at midnight, tucked up in Lorna's spare room, I can still
hear them going overhead. (As an aside, although I do not have any air
pollution monitoring equipment with me, I can report that Cranford fails the
black bogey test spectacularly. After 12 hours there, my hanky looks like an
engine rag.)
When I go on an exploratory walk at eight the next morning, by which time the
planes are using the southern runway, I begin to appreciate the value of the
alternation system the airport agreed to put in place some 30 years ago to
give the residents some degree of relief. Currently, aircraft land on one
runway between 4am and 3pm and take off from the other the rest of the time
and then vice versa for a week at a time. Philippa Edmunds, a communications
consultant living about a mile from a flight path in East Twickenham, refers
to this procedure as "a lifesaver". "It makes such a big difference to be
able to fall asleep with an open window and know that you will just have to
get up and close the window when the planes start again in the morning," she
says. "If you get the noise all day, it drives you potty, but if you know
you're getting half a day's peace, you can plan your life - or at least a
barbecue - round that. I can't tell you how valuable it is."
It's also under threat. BA, Virgin and BMI gave their backing in 2003 to a
proposal to do away with alternation and bring in a "mixed mode" sage of the
runways, which would employ both between 4am and 11.30pm in order to increase
the number of flights from 80 to 90 an hour. "If it happens it will make life
absolut