If you have read our Motorway in the Sky article you may get the impression that there are only a few flights taking off over people’s houses. To make things clear those images have only a few flights shown.
Here are a few images with the bigger picture:
These are the early flights – part of the restricted night-time operation. They depart the south runway and climb straight ahead before turning (as of 2023; since July 2025 the North Runway may be used from 06:00) although they only go out to 5 nautical miles rather than 10 as we would prefer.
Then it kicks off at 0700. These are the 30 or so flights making sure lots of people are wide awake.
From 8am to 9am it continues, every 2 minutes on average.
And they keep coming and coming for hours on end. This was 1st September 2023. Keep in mind that right turn was never supposed to happen so the people affected were never involved in the planning process, because why would they be, they were never supposed to be “Unexpectedly Overflown!”
The same 24 hours zoomed in. These communities, all 2 to 4 km north of the runway and its planned straight-out track, are getting hammered by direct overflights, all day every day. Kilcoskan National School, with its autism unit, is invisible because it’s buried under so many lines. Over the year to February 2026, daa’s noise monitor at the school recorded about 170 aircraft noise events a day, typically peaking at about 75 dB(A).
Want to see a whole day of these flights over your own street? Try Overhead.