“Airplanes cause noise, we all know this, and people who choose to buy a house near the airport shouldn’t be surprised!”
A bit harsh perhaps, but most people will have some degree of sympathy for this view, especially when packaged up with clever sneering soundbites by the bold boy of Irish Aviation. It gets a bit grey when you start to ask what do you consider to be “near the airport”? 10km away? Do you consider those buying a house in Raheny, Blackrock or Stepaside to be “near the Phoenix park”? How about 5km away or 2km? Where’s the cut off for “near the airport”?
Next up … near in which direction? The runway points east west, what if you live 5km to the north and have been told for 16 years the aircraft will fly straight ahead for 5 nautical miles (9.26km) before turning? Then you wake up on in August of 2022 to find they fly over your house. “Oops”, says the DAA, “Yeah, that was unexpected! Oh well.”
There is a lot more going on here than complaints that are, in the words of Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, “all … made up”. These are people being driven to distraction while trying to live in a house some of them have owned for 50 years. About 14,000 people are now newly overflown, and about 30,000 live within 3 km of the routes. In the runway’s first months, daa called it being “unexpectedly overflown”!
Our objective here is not “whinge” but rather to publish the proposal we have made to improve the situation to the benefit of the DAA, the airlines, most of the affected residents and Fingal County Council. This site aims to explain some of the technical detail and rebut some of the inaccuracies flooding the media, especially since Fingal County Council attempted to enforce the night flight restriction.
Have a look at Motorway in the Sky to better understand the problem and our proposed solution.
