The picture is Red Arrows, Russian Roulette, Manston Summer
1968 from the featured book.
Today’s featured book is the only book I publish about the
history of Manston Airport. To be honest if you are interested in the history
of Manston Airport there are very few books about it and this is the only one
you are likely to get under £10, here is the link if you want to buy it online http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/1997_twilight_of_pistons.htm
There are of course plenty of books about Manston as a
military airbase, this is a picture of the Manston books on the shelves in my
bookshop today.
If you are interested in Manston Airport then probably the
background to how and why the airbase there became an airport is the first two
chapters of Twilight of Pistons written by one of the Manston staff who was
there is probably the best account of this. Here are the links to the first two
chapters in full:-
The old question of whether there will ever be an airport at
Manston is still ongoing with the possibility of a DCO still in the offing,
there is much hot air about this, however the reliable updates are on the
Department for Transport’s website at https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-east/manston-airport/?ipcsection=advice
What does seem to be certain is that the American real
estate brokers RiverOak Investments have sold off their interests in the
Manston airfreight hub DCO to a different company RSP, here is their website http://www.rsp.co.uk/
The other side of the coin here is that the site owners
Stonehill Park are still getting on with their plans for a mixed use light
industrial and residential development, here is their website http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/
My own stance on the issue, which dates back over the last
ten years and is all published on my blog, just click on the link and when you
get to the bottom of the page click on the Older Posts link http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Manston%20Airport
is pretty much sceptical support for a regional airport.
This stance has always been coupled with my feelings that
were Manston ever to be an airport again it must have proper environmental
controls and not be run with out an EP (Environmental Permit) like it was
before.
I don’t want an airfreight hub that I can’t fly from and
have never supported that, and on the Stonehill Park plans for housing and job
creation it’s one again sceptical support. This is supported by the fact that
the same people did pull this off with the Pfizer site, which is now the
largest local source of employment.
With both of these one of the key issues is the
environmental balance which is a sum that’s answer is a measure of local health
and life expectancy. So if you go back into prehistoric times you had no
industrial pollution to reduce health life expectancy but none of the benefits
of an industrialised society to increase it. The net result of this was a life
expectancy of about 35.
I can’t really say much about the plans for light industry
on the Manston site as I don’t know what it would be at this stage, but the airfreight hub has taken a downward swing in the last few days.
The main pollution problem with Manston back in the days
when it was an airbase was the noise. Now when it comes to internal combustion
engine noise, it can be very enjoyable, I have had various classic motorbikes
and cars over the years, and making the noise can be very enjoyable. There is
also a spectator side to this, go to a motor race or speed trials and the noise
is part of the fun, but there comes a point when even the drivers or pilots
want a break from the noise.
Back in the 1950s and 60s when Manston was an American
airbase the American pilots and officers were all white men, while the support
staff were mostley black Americans. The aircraft noise was over the town of
Ramsgate, while Margate was both quiet in terms of jet aircraft noise but a
lively seaside town in terms of entertainment.
The American air force officers produced what to them (at
the time) was the obvious solution, a color bar or racial apartheid based on
skin colour. With Margate being of limits to coloured Americans [black
Americans] and white Americans not going to Ramsgate where the black Americans
were and also the aircraft noise.
This link takes you to one of the newspaper articles http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts2/id71.htm
Anyway the news articles this time around relate to diesel
fuel and the particulate pollution, the little particles that it produces which
lodge in your lungs if you breathe the fumes in and reduce your life
expectancy.
Jet engines burn avgas which is much worse that diesel
engines on the particulate pollution front and particularly a problem in the
area upwind of where it is burnt for about a distance of seven miles.
Now a 747 type freight plane burns a ton of avgas during each
movement, either landing or takeoff, I don’t suppose I have to explain the
prevailing wind direction in Thanet, draw a diagram, talk about turkeys voting
for Christmas etc for you gentle reader to see the problem.
Of course when Manston closed we were all being encouraged to
buy diesel cars, but now assuming a 747 movement took half an hour, it does
make you wonder how many diesel cars it would take to burn a ton of fuel in
half an hour.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.