Manston aircraft noise last night

Did anyone get woken up by the 4.34 am landing at Manston last night? It had a noise rating of QC2.

Please note this isn't a pro or anti airport post, but just related to the fact that I seldom know the noise rating for a night flight that I have actually heard.

Here are the flight details
Date 26.09.12
Time 0434 Arr 0609 Dep
Operator/Aircraft
Cargolux B744

Not sure of the date of the picture of Concord at Manston, possibly 1988.      

Kent International Airport Manston Night Flights Consultation

The anti night flights lobby has taken to the road in a classic bus, when I went out for my lunchtime walk today it was parked up at Ramsgate Harbour and there were lots of local people discussing night flights, aircraft noise and writing responses to the open consultation being carried out by Thanet District Council.

Regardless of your feelings about night flights I would recommend having your say on this issue, when it comes local consultation this is an important one and like it or not local government is moving slowly towards using local consultations to make decisions.

The internet really does theoretically make it possible to do without politicians and ask everyone who wants to, to make the decisions instead.

If you want to take part in this consultation you have until Friday to do this online click on the link http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council__democracy/consultation/night-time_flying_policy.aspx for the council’s webpages about the consultation.

The council haven’t made this an easy one, you can’t just enter your name and postcode and tick, yes I want night flights of no I don’t want night flights. What you have to do is send them an email or write to them.

Responses must contain your full name and address (WITH YOUR POSTCODE) either email your response to consultation@thanet.gov.uk or post it to:

Thanet District Council,

PO Box 9,

Margate,

CT9 1XZ

The airport’s main argument for night flights is that they will help with the economic regeneration of Thanet, their latest documentation is here http://www.manstonairport.com/userfiles/files/Night-flight-policy/Plane-Speaking-newsletter-after-event-LR.pdf

They also seem to running their own night flights consultation and you can of course email your responses to consultation@manstonairport.com

According to their latest document you can: “take a moment to let us and Thanet District Council know your thoughts on our proposed night-time flying

policy and the future of Manston Airport.”

Then it says: “Your comments may also be forwarded to Thanet District Council.”

I have to admit that my taking an even handed approach to this issue is wearing a bit thin, I had assumed that the airport was taking this issue seriously and maintaining a professional approach to the issue, but this sort of nonsense is not helpful. 

I have heard now from three independent sources that the airport operators are in the process of trying to sell the airport to a Middle Eastern operator. I have also heard that Flybee pulled out of the airport because the operator wasn’t to prepared to invest in their facilities there.

I am of course treating this as rumour at the moment, but I think this is a different consultation viewed with a background of an operator minimising investment and trying to sell the airport, than it would be with an operator with a long term commitment to the airport.

I have given this consultation a considerable amount of thought and concluded that I can’t make an informed response without some experience of the disruption that the night flights the want would make.

Frankly with out a period of actual night flights being made over Ramsgate by the loudest planes they are asking for flying the maximum number of flights at the most disruptive of hours, I just don’t know if I would get enough sleep to function properly.

I have suggested before that one way out to this problem, that would actually link the level of disruption to the actual economic benefits, would be to allow the airport the same proportion of night flights to day flights as that enjoyed by Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

Something that concerns me is that there is always money to be made out of the increasingly strict environmental controls being imposed across the world and that any commercial operation that has lesser environmental controls than its competition is able to exploit this situation at a profit, to the detriment of the area the operate in.    

I will continue with this as I get time.     

Thanet District Council night flights report now published

Here is the link to the full report http://www.thanet.gov.uk/pdf/Manston%20International%20%20Airport%20Validation%20Report%20230112.pdf  


I am having a very busy day today which means that the odd chances I get to read this thing, mostly standing in queues, is on my mobile, so here is a link to a text only version of the document for anyone else in the same predicament http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/112/id5.htm  

If you have read this report like I have, I guess that the overall conclusion is that the airport have presented a case for night flights that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Up to now we have had the anti night flights lobby saying that the airport was asking for something unreasonable, the airport saying that they weren’t, well now we an expert opinion saying that the airport are asking for something unreasonable.  

Not only does what they are proposing exceed the normal and reasonable levels for noise, but their employment projections don’t add up.

The employment projections are important because there is an employment downside, something that I think is clearest in the Olympic night flights that I covered the other day, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2012/01/olympic-night-flights-at-manston.html

In simple terms Ramsgate is under the main flight path and combining this information with the information that there are to four landings or takeoffs allowed from Manston every hour between 11pm and 5am during the Olympics, regardless of any other information, given the option of a similar town, would you book into a hotel here during the Olympics?

Obviously this has employment implications not only for the hotels here but the businesses that get extra custom from people visiting Ramsgate.   

I suppose often in Thanet the difficulty is a decoding process, rather than looking at some firms proposals and deciding if we want them to happen here, we do seem to attract potty schemes that get support and investment from our local government. Six figure sums they have invested in EKO that hasn’t produced the employment it was meant to, or Pleasurama another large council spend, where the developer is building without following the basic safety recommendations of the environment agency.

So one has to try and decode what the airport actually intend here, by this I mean why they asked for something unreasonable in the first place. 

One possibility is that the council has developed a bit of history for being lax and so the airport thought they could get away with something that wouldn’t be tolerated elsewhere.

Another possibility is this is all part of some bargaining process that will eventually lead to the airport restrictions being the same as other similar UK airports. 

Another possibility is that the airport owners are trying to achieve as lax a regulation as they can with the objective of making the airport attractive to a potential buyer.    

Don’t get me wrong here, I am not against the airport, when a plane comes over I am more inclined to take a picture of it that moan about the noise.

That said I don’t get a sense that they have done anything much to engage the local community, even those who would just like to know when they are expecting an interesting plane so one can take a picture of it flying overhead. 


My own thoughts here are that we don’t really stand much chance of getting much in the way of employment intensive industry here in Thanet, but we do have some potential for tourism.

I think up to a point The Turner Contemporary has proved this, there appears to be much more demand for a leisure destination here in the southeast than there was even twenty years ago.

I would guess that if the airport wants to succeed it’s the expansion of the historic aircraft side that makes sense and if the operators are going to continue subsidising it at a six figure level, then they are in the position to achieve this to an eventual state where they would probably see a profit.

As I said I was in a bit of a rush today and seem to have overdone the pictures fo the amount of text, please excuse this error. 

Olympic Night Flights at Manston

Apparently up to 44 aircraft between 10pm and 7am see http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kentonline/news/2012/january/21/olympics_flights.aspx#.TxrvZ8b7HNk.twitter

For some comparison Heathrow gets about 16 flights per night period, which is between 11.30pm - 6.00am

All the way down the line with the night flights issue it is the ratio between day flights and night flights that concers me. Heathrow for instance would have about 1,300 flights a day and all the associated jobs for their 16 night flights, we seem to get 168 day flights for our 44 night flights.

Make no mistake here this isn’t and anti airport or an anti night flights post, this is about ratio between economic benefit from nuisance and appears to set an unfortunate benchmark for the future.

Update the allowance is two arrivals and departures – that is four flights per hour - every hour between 11pm and 5am, six flights per hour between 5am and 8am and eight flights between 10pm and 11pm.

Thanet District Council Meeting Tomorrow, Animal Exports, Airport, Webcasting, Standards.

It looks like this meeting will be covering a lot of issues and I will write something here later today about them if I get time.

The picture above is of a Ramsgate Council meeting, this presumably comes from a time when one was allowed to take pictures of council meetings.

First night flights, there are some night flights occurring around this point in time, my understanding is that these are to fly food to our troops in Afghanistan, I don’t think that anyone I know in Ramsgate objects to these flights.

But it does surprise me that the airport hasn’t taken advantage of this opertunity for positive publicity.

I don’t think the airport operator has any concept of taking the town of Ramsgate with them on anything at all, minor pr opportunities like announcing when the Red Arrows or some other interesting aircraft are likely to be flying over the town, so that residents have an opportunity to take a picture, seem to be something they have missed.

One of the noisest and most disruptive businesses in Ramsgate was the Sally Line and yet this business was well supported by Ramsgate residents. Infratil just don’t seem to have got the message and will fly a noisy plane at 7am on still Sunday morning low over the town when the obviously don’t need to or carry on endless low training flights over the town when they could obviously do this somewhere where hardly anyone lives. Well now the have got lot peoples backs up and they mostly have themselves to blame.

Night flights has become a party political issue, how daft can you get, well I suppose as flights over Ramsgate have even been a racist issue, anything goes.

Rumour is that there is Infratil are keen to sell Manston and that some other operators have been sniffing around, as Infratil lost £3m last year on their UK airport business this raises the interesting question of what anyone would pay for a business that loses that much a year. 


I suppose the only logical way forward for the airport is to expand the aspect of it that has been successful which mostly relates to aviation heritage, a base for air shows and short haul flights that don’t make much noise anyway.    

There will be a question for the leader I suppose like a mini PMQ, this is what it says:

“1.1       According to Council Procedure Rule 14, a Member of the Council may ask a Member of the Cabinet or the Chairman of any Committee or Sub-Committee, a question on any matter in relation to which the Council has powers or duties or which affects the district, providing they have given at least five working days notice in writing of the question, limited to fifty words.

2.0       The Current Situation

2.1       On 4 July 2011, the Democratic Services & Scrutiny Manager received from Councillor Poole the following question addressed to Councillor Bayford:

2.2       “Substantial ERDF grants were given to a number of local businesses during the early 2000s, following a stringent process of selection.   Will you explain why, from 2003 onwards, there wasn’t an effective process to ensure the monies were spent according to the strict criteria used when the grants were agreed?”

I am not so sure what it means.

On to the business of webcasting council meetings, apparently at the moment it costs the council about £250 in staff costs to convert the DVD, that they already make, into the right file format and put it online.

Anyone who has ever put a dvd on Youtube will probably wonder if they paid an officer to sit there while the file converted and went up on the internet.

To me converting a video file means opening it in the right program and going off and doing something else while the computer gets on with the job and then coming back and finding the file in your Youtube account, clicking on upload and then going off and doing something else while it uploads.

When the idea was first suggested I told the council that if they sent me the dvd I would be happy to put it online for them, for nothing. The dvds get made anyway you understand.    

Then there is the live animal transport motion, this isn’t something you have to clean up with a shovel, but the following:

1.1.      Council Procedure Rule No. 16 governs the process for motions on notice being submitted to Council.  

1.2.1        The following motion on notice has been received from Councillor Fenner in accordance with the Council Procedure Rules:

“Council resolves to seek a legal opinion on whether TDC can lawfully ban the transportation of live farm animals from the Port of Ramsgate on the ground that they are ‘sentient beings’ and not ‘goods’.” 

Update, news of the council meeting is slowly filtering out, with Simon Moores rather bizarre tweet “After a very long day indeed, tonight's Council meeting was best viewed through the lens of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland'”

And this from the Labour group http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id8.htm

Nothing from the council press and information department yet.