The Quiet Revolution

The Airports Commission could be driving a quiet revolution in the way aircraft noise is measured.  

A blog about noise measurements?!  

Resist the temptation to stop reading!  For this could turn out to be one of the most significant and far-reaching things to emerge from the Commission.

For decades the Department for Transport (DfT) has clung desperately to its favoured way of measuring aircraft noise in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was dreadfully out-of-date with present-day realities.  Howard Davies’s no-nonsense approach has found them out and leaves them no place to hide.

The current metric the DfT uses – and the one adopted by Heathrow Airport in making its case for a third runway – to measure noise (or noise annoyance) suggests there is no problem with aircraft noise in places like Fulham, Putney or Ealing.  Clearly not reality! 

 This much-criticised metric, known as LAeq, averages out the noise over a 16 hour day, which is then usually averaged out over a year.  Most people accept that does not accurately reflect the way people are disturbed by the noise as it includes the quiet periods of the day and the quiet days of the year.  It also gives too much weight to the noise of each individual aircraft (which has fallen over the years) and not enough the number of planes overhead (which has increased dramatically in recent years).  Using LAeq, four hours worth of non-stop noise from Boeing 757s at a rate of one every two minutes is said to cause the same annoyance as one extremely loud Concorde followed by 3 hours 58 minutes of relief.  Clearly not a reflection of reality!  There has also been criticism that the level at which noise annoyance sets in – 57 db LAeq – is unrealistically high.

When the Commission’s shortlisted proposals are appraised over the coming months, the Commission will only expect the 57 db LAeq metric to be used to make historical comparisons.  It is ushering a whole new era of noise measurement in its appraisal document https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/airports-commission-appraisal-framework 

The Airports Commission use – and require the promoters of the shortlisted schemes to use- the metric required by the European Commission – Lden – where noise is measured over a 12 hour day; a 4 hour evening; and an 8 hour night; with 5 and 10 decibels being added to the evening and night levels respectively to reflect the lower background noise levels at these times.  Many argue this gives a more accurate picture of noise annoyance.  The Commission will also use a 54 db LAeq metric.  Additionally, it will employ a complementary metric – N 70 – which measures the number of aircraft above 70 decibels passing over a property, providing the sort of understandable information local residents appreciate.

And the difference in the numbers of being impacted by the metrics the Commission will be using and that used by the DfT is startling.   Using 55 Lden, 725,000 people are impacted by noise from Heathrow; 57 db LAeq puts it at 245,000.  

It will be very difficult for the Department for Transport or individual airports to revert to using only the 57 LAeq method of measuring noise annoyance post-Davies.  Whatever comes of its runway proposals, the Airports Commission will have set in train a quiet revolution in measuring aircraft noise.  Policy in future will be made on the basis of much more accurate noise measurements. 

I’m not a Yorkshireman but, for once, I need to be as blunt as a Yorkshireman.  The Airports Commission has got it wrong on noise.  And, unless it changes tack, its final recommendation will be fatally flawed and forever contested.

The Airports Commission has accepted the industry’s chosen method of measuring aircraft noise.  That enabled it to write this dreadful paragraph (6.102) in its Interim Report:

“The number of people affected by noise around Heathrow is higher than at any other European airport, with a population of roughly 240,000 currently living within the 57LAeq.  By 2030, this is forecast to fall by roughly 150,000 due to improvements in technology and operations.  The impact of the construction and operation of the proposed third runway is estimated to be roughly neutral possibly even offering a further reduction over the expected baseline.”

Yes, by 2030 the planes will be a bit quieter and they will possibly be descending more steeply so flying higher for longer periods, but, with a third runway, there will be another 280,000 of them.  Only by using a distorted metric can the Airports Commission write the paragraph it did. 

There is one thing above all the metric fails to take on board properly.  It does not recognise that it is the sheer number of planes now using Heathrow that causes so much disturbance and brings so many complaints.  The fact that the planes have become quieter is welcome but not significant when set aside the fact that aircraft numbers have doubled since the 1980s.

The Commission has underestimated the current levels of noise annoyance because the metric it uses to measure it (called LAeq) gives too little weight to the number of aircraft overhead and too much to the noise of each individual plane when assessing noise disturbance.  As a result, it does not reflect the extent of the problem.

One example illustrates just how far off-course the Commission is.  Using the current way of measuring noise, four hours worth of non-stop noise from Boeing 757s at a rate of one every two minutes is said to cause the same annoyance as one extremely loud Concorde followed by 3 hours 58 minutes of relief: http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/hacan.the_quiet_con.pdf  Clearly not a reflection of reality! 

The Commission’s chairman, Sir Howard Davies, recognized in his speech introducing the Interim Report on 17^th December that there are other ways of measuring noise annoyance to the one he is currently using.  Let’s hope it is top of his New Year’s wish list to explore these other metrics or his final report will lack validity.

The irrelevance of the current metric, allowing the claim that fewer people are affected by noise from Heathrow than for decades, is contradicted by the reality on the ground.  When HACAN started 45 years ago, it had a different name KACAN – Kew Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise.  (I know we specialize in dreadful acronyms!).  It represented just the West London suburbs of Kew and Richmond.  Even when fighting the Terminal 5 Inquiry, HACAN just covered West London and parts of Berkshire.  It was only in the mid-1990s that HACAN started to become the regional body it is today.  And that was entirely because the number planes using Heathrow had reached a tipping point for so many people across London and the Home Counties.  This summer the greatest number of complaints HACAN received was from SE London: http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/living.under.the.heathrow.flight.path.today.pdf

In my view, the aviation industry is clinging on to its noise metric, LAeq, because, without it, its claims that a 3^rd runway could be built with no increase in the noise footprint would unravel.

However, there is another prop the industry in the UK also needs to sustain that claim.  It maintains that people only start to get annoyed when aircraft noise, averaged out over a 16 hour day, reaches 57 decibel – what is known as the 57 db LAeq contour.  Outside that contour are places like Fulham and Putney.  Go tell Justine Greening, the feisty MP for Putney, that aircraft noise is not a problem in her constituency!

In fact, in her submission to the Airports Commission, Greening was scathing about the current contour: ““I believe this strongly shows that taking a traditional 57dB approach to assessing the level of noise annoyance from any new aviation strategy will exclude a large number of people who will be annoyed and affected but live outside of the 57dB noise contours.”

The European Commission also believes that the 57 db LAeq contour is misleading.  It requires member states to use a different metric – called 55Len – when drawing up their noise maps.  Under this method, noise is averaged out over a 12 hour day; then, separately, over a 4 hour evening and an 8 hour night, with 5 and 10 decibels added to the evening and night periods respectively to reflect the lower background noise levels at these times.  This comes up with more realistic results.  It extends the noise boundaries to places like Vauxhall and Clapham.  But even this method does not cover all the places where people are annoyed as the averaging out includes the quieter periods of the day and the quiet days of the year.  If averages were taken only at times the planes were flying, then the contour would stretch into South East London.  Now, that’s reality!

It is little wonder the UK aviation industry is so reluctant to use the metric recommended by the European Commission.  It would force it to admit that over 700,000 people are impacted by noise from Heathrow; as against ‘only’ 240,000 using its favoured method.

People of my generation will remember the day when that blunt Yorkshireman, Harvey Smith, gave a V-sign to the judges following a near perfect round which won him the British Show Jumping Derby in 1971.  Howard Davies, although a Mancunian, needs to take a leaf out of Harvey Smith’s book and do the same to the aviation industry’s chosen method of measuring noise annoyance.  Or all his final recommendations will be fatally flawed. 

A blog from Frankfurt

Originally put together by ‘Mainz and Rhine-Main: Together against aircraft noise’; abridged by John Stewart

13/1/14

If this blog was a film, it would be x-rated.  It contains graphic and compelling descriptions of the suffering of people hit by aircraft noise when the 4th runway opened.

When the fourth runway opened at Frankfurt in 2011, it resulted in massive protests, which still continue with thousands of people occupying the terminal every Monday evening.  The flight paths over the city and the surrounding area were re-organised to accommodate the new runway, bringing serious aircraft noise to over 100,000 people for the first time.  

In this blog some of the people tell of the way their lives were turned upside down.

Give the noise-affected a voice

This blog aims to give a voice to people like us who are living with continuous noise above our heads, at levels of 80 decibels or more, 18 hours a day from 5am to 11am.  

The emails and other comments below give you an idea of what we are suffering:

“A silent Christmas?  Time for contemplation?  Elsewhere, it is accepted as a matter of course.  Not here!  Because of the unimaginable noise that has been imposed upon the people by the airport authorities”.

“Imagine it: Sunday, a relaxing mood, the sun is already shining, a day to enjoy peace and quiet – in fact: at 5 o’clock in the morning the first aeroplane startles us out of our sleep – and then it goes on, every the minute, at 80 decibels, without a break. No one can recover from that.  The result of a policy made between the aviation authorities and the politicians.  A policy imposed on citizens”. 

“Over 100 years ago in 1905 the bacteriologist and Nobel laureate Robert Koch prophesized: “The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.”  It has come true today in the case of aircraft noise victims.  Greetings from the Frankfurt South: 5.00 am and already overflown”. 

“Since 5.00 o’clock the planes have being coming over the south of Frankfurt, unbearably low…..remember, the airport is planning even more of them”.

“Silent night, holy night, until 5 o’clock when the planes wake you up.  They crash and roar over Frankfurt South.  Roth, Bouffier, Schulte [German politicians] and other lousy types are still in a deep sleep”.  

“There would be a simple means to demonstrate to these people the noise hell we have to endure. Invite one of them home for 3 days home over Christmas. We have to suffer for 3 days 18-hours of continuous sound. At the feast of peace, we have to endure the whole days sitting under the noise.  We can not even escape to work or to school. Fuck Christmas! May it pass quickly”.

“We should tell Al-Wazir [the leader of the Greens who had just taken his party in a controversial regional coalition with the Conservative CDU Party] that hedoes not match his Green by his words with his deeds.  As long as at planes fly at low altitude from 5.00 clock (like today) over Frankfurt South, the situation remains intolerable.  The problems have been there ever since the 4^th runway opened in 2011.  It is reckless torture.  Everywhere is too loud.  All of us are systematically denied sleep.  Fraport [the airport] has become one of most hated companies in Rhine-Main. It must be smaller!”  

“The World Health Organisation warns that annually 1 million healthy years of life lost in the EU by noise. These economic costs should be offset against the supposed profits of aviation.  It is high time for a shift in the policy!”

“My generation looked back to 1945 and hoped and believed that totalitarianism had been finally overcome! I was thoroughly wrong!”

“2009: 485, 783 aircraft movements at Frankfurt Airport; 2012: 482, 242 aircraft movements at Frankfurt Airport.  Without a single extra flight, the catastrophic fourth runway led to a DOUBLING of the noise and 100,000 people needlessly suffering more noise.The Frankfurt hub at its current size, with absurd growth ambitions for more transfer passengers, is a crime against the people.  Things need to change.  There are a huge number of unnecessary short-distance flights to Berlin and Dusseldorf when there is an excellent train service.  37.7% of Lufhansa’s flights from the airport are short-distance.  This is ecologically unsustainable.  Mayday, mayday … we need your help!”

“We need noise limits for continuous noise – but also for individual events.  And we need others noise laws to apply to aircraft”.

“Hello from Sachsenhausen, I was as a child taught not to lie, do not cheat, do not steal, etc…. to respect nature and to help our planet live in harmony with nature. And to be tolerant of other people and their cultures!  These were the values ​​I have also taught my son. He is now 12 years and has seen the politicians sell out to the airport. 100,000 thousands of people ‘displaced’; our homes brutally destroyed; the environment dirty; and disastrous for the global warming!  Our family is sick, our child is not sleeping and I could only cry when every 60 seconds a plane shakes our house”.

A third runway at Heathrow will never be built.  That is my confident prediction for 2014…..and 2015!  It is not simply that I don’t want it to be built.  I firmly believe that it is just not politically deliverable.

And it is not just me saying this.  Steven Norris, the former Conservative transport minister turned successful businessman, has consistently taken this view. And Willie Walsh, the boss of the International Aviation Group which includes British Airways (BA), told a conference over a year ago that he did not believe a third runway at Heathrow would ever be built and that his company was basing its future plans on that belief by buying slots from other airlines at Heathrow and expanding its operations in Madrid – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/aviation/9717087/Willie-Walsh-rules-out-third-runway-at-Heathrow.html. Walsh said it is “my personal belief that a third runway will never be built” and that “we are planning for life without it.”  

So far we have heard nothing from the supporters of a 3^rd runway on this.  We know why they want it but no discussion about how they believe will succeed this time round when they failed just a few short years ago. 

There are, though, some real signs that they have learnt lessons from that failure.  A decade ago a self-confident industry felt sure it would get its new runway.  Today it understands that is far from inevitable.  It is the reason why Heathrow Airport is putting so much effort into trying to mitigate noise.  It’s probably the reason it changed its name from BAA.  And why Back Heathrow has been set up: to test and challenge the claims that most people in the worst affected areas oppose a 3^rd runway.  The promoters of Heathrow Hub also get it. The whole rationale of their proposal is an attempt to make a new runway more acceptable to the bloc of voters in West London.

This change of tactic is a recognition they are on the back-foot.  It is the opponents of expansion who are now self-confident.  We climbed the mountain to achieve victory against all the odds in 2010 – read about it http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/how.the.heathrow.campaign.was.won.pdf.  We believe we can do it again, if we need to.

I suspect that many in business and industry, and some of their supporters in the media, are still deluding themselves that our victory was down to luck, being in the right place at the right time, a one-off fluke.  Time will tell.  

I feel that our victory was more Andy Murray, who has a great chance of winning further grand-slams after his victory at Wimbledon, than Marion Bartoli, who promptly retired six weeks after taking the women’s title.  

Here’s why.

Those who took part in the decade-long campaign last time round have not gone away.  They have all invested far too much in it to let the victory be overturned.  Residents will still battle to save their homes and communities from destruction.  Thousands will fight the prospect of a new flight path over their heads.  Environmental groups won’t sit back and let an iconic victory against climate change be snatched away from them.  Plane Stupid didn’t risk life and limb on the roof of the House of Commons only for Harmondsworth to be concreted over.

And all this is backed up by considerable cross-party political support. Look around the cabinet table:  the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Business Secretary Vince Cable, Home Secretary Theresa May, the Secretaries of State for the Environment, International Development and Northern Ireland, Ed Davey, Justine Greening and Theresa Villiers and Defence Secretary Philip Hammond are all known opponents of a 3^rd runway.  Political parties as different as UKIP and the Greens are firmly opposed to expansion.

And the tide is turning in Western Europe against expansion.  Over the last two years public pressure has forced a third runway at Munich to be dropped and plans for new airports in Siena and Viterbo in Italy to be abandoned.  In Frankfurt, thousands of campaigners have occupied the terminal every Monday evening for over two years in protest against the impact of the 4^th runway, opened by Angela Merkel in 2011.  And last Winter saw pitched battles in the French countryside between police and activists as the authorities tried to clear the land for a new airport outside Nantes.

I don’t know what the country as a whole thinks about a 3^rd runway.  I suspect it doesn’t really matter in political terms.  What matters politically is that any government which proposes a 3^rd runway will know it faces considerable opposition and the real possibility of never being able to build it.  I hope the supporters of Heathrow expansion are ready with a Plan B.

This blog is being written on Boxing Day.  It may be because I’m a sad obsessive.  But it is also because HACAN, like Heathrow, never closes.  We get complaints about aircraft noise Every.Single.Day.Of.The.Year.

I stress this because recently stories have appeared which suggest that house prices are what really motivates people to complain about Heathrow.  A typical example of this was Anthony Hilton’s piece in the Standard on 19^th December.  I quote it in full:

Heathrow objectors on wrong path

The first flat I bought in London was under the Heathrow flight path. It was suitably cheap, and the trade-off between price and noise seemed a compromise worth making.

That presumably also holds true for everyone else who has bought a house in West London in the past 60-plus years. The airport has been there since 1945. They knew it was there when they bought.

Things have improved to some extent over the years because aircraft are a lot quieter than they used to be. Heathrow may be full but the noise made by individual planes going overhead is nothing like it was in the Sixties and Seventies when the skies were full of Boeing 707s, or in the following decade with Concorde. As planes have got bigger, they have also become quieter with a smaller noise footprint.

No doubt those under the flight path nevertheless feel justified in resisting further expansion of the airport, and it would be only human for them to wonder at the leap in value of their homes should the airport ever be closed. But I am not sure that is sufficient reason for the rest of us to agree with them.

There are so many inaccuracies in this short piece.  Indeed, the basic premise is wrong.  There is no evidence to suggest that, with the possible exception of properties very close to the airport, the price of houses under the flight paths is lower than elsewhere in London.  Work carried out by Heathrow Airport shows they are not.  Indeed many argue that houses prices in West London would fall if Heathrow shut because its relatively easy access to the world’s busiest international airport adds value to the property.  Many homes in Kew and Richmond sell for a million pounds or more.  And people paid a fortune for the apartments in the new developments around Battersea Power Station, right under the flight path.  It all reflects the buoyancy of the London housing market.

It appears that the only time property prices may be affected is when houses, previously unaffected by aircraft noise, find themselves under a flight path for the first time.  A leading estate agent told the Standard on 13^th December that house prices could suffer a five per cent price hit if they were suddenly under a new flight path from a bigger Heathrow.  Another, Dominic Agace, chief executive of estate agents Winkworth, doubted new noise would have a significant impact on prices but said there could be a shift over time to quieter areas. 

Anthony Hilton’s piece also fails to understand what has happened to the noise climate in recent years.  He correctly states that individual aircraft are quieter than they were 30 or 40 years ago but then makes the common mistake of assuming that means the overall noise climate has improved, despite more than double the number of planes using the airport. 

He is not alone in this claim.  Heathrow Airport makes the same argument.  And, sadly, much of it has found its way into in the Airports Commission Interim Report, published shortly before Christmas:

The claim that the noise climate is improving is not reflected in residents’ experiences.  When HACAN started 45 years ago, it had a different name KACAN – Kew Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise.  (I know we specialize in dreadful acronyms!).  It represented just the West London suburbs of Kew and Richmond.  Even when fighting the Terminal 5 Inquiry, HACAN just covered West London and parts of Berkshire.  It was only in the mid-1990s that HACAN started to become the regional body it is today.  And that was down entirely to the number of planes using Heathrow.  This summer the greatest number of complaints HACAN received was from SE London: http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/living.under.the.heathrow.flight.path.today.pdf

The problem is that the way aircraft noise annoyance is measured doesn’t fully capture the impact increased numbers of aircraft using an airport.  The metric gives too much weight to the noise of individual aircraft and not enough to the effect of increased numbers.  It utterly distorts things.  For example it would find that four hours worth of non-stop noise from Boeing 757s at a rate of one every two minutes causes the same annoyance as one extremely loud Concorde followed by 3 hours 58 minutes of relief: http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/hacan.the_quiet_con.pdf  Clearly not a reflection of reality!  

It is noise not house prices which motivates people to email HACAN on Christmas Day.  As they top up their sherry glasses after finishing their plum pudding, it’s not concern about the price of their home which persuades them to email HACAN; it’s the fact that the Queen’s message has been drowned out by the latest passing plane.

Howard Davies has surprised us all.  We expected his Interim Report, to be published on Tuesday 17^th December, to earmark Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick and probably an Estuary option for further consideration.  Nobody thought it would be focused almost entirely on Heathrow.

Yet we now have it on good authority that the draft Davies presented to the Chancellor George Osborne for his comments was all about Heathrow.  Davies is suggesting a third runway at Heathrow, followed, if the demand is there, by a fourth or a second runway at Gatwick.  Both the Stansted and Estuary options had been dropped.

Sources say that Osborne was taken aback at the exclusive focus on Heathrow and suggested to Davies he may need to formally include other options in his report to give it the semblance of balance.  We will see what appears on Tuesday.

But it is clear that it is Heathrow and Heathrow alone which interests Davies.  This has huge implications.

In the short-term it will delight Heathrow Airport and its business backers.   But I suspect that Heathrow, if not all its backers, know that their real struggle has just begun.  They will be fully aware that Davies’s naked support for Heathrow is likely to be the trigger for the start of a huge campaign against the expansion of Heathrow.  Gone will be the consensus Davies has tried to create.  If he has nailed his colours to the Heathrow mask, he will be regarded as firmly in the Heathrow camp as London First, Ksawi Kwarteng or Back Heathrow.  There will be nothing more to say to him…except ‘no’.

Heathrow Airport is only too aware that they are taking on a campaign with a successful track record.  Just a few years ago a diverse coalition of local residents, politicians, local authorities, environmental groups and direct action activists were instrumental in stopping a third runway:  http://www.hacan.org.uk/resources/reports/how.the.heathrow.campaign.was.won.pdf

That coalition is merely in abeyance and is confident that it can see off expansion a second time round.  Some of the businesses backing a third runway put that victory down to luck but Heathrow Airport know that it is a force to be reckoned with because of the support, tacit or active, that it has amongst residents in the most overflown city in the world.  It is a key why reason Heathrow Airport has put so much time and end effort into noise mitigation measures.

Davies is backing the most politically undeliverable of all the options.  He must be aware that opposition ranges from the Mayor of London to Plane Stupid; from Greenpeace to the London Assembly; from cabinet ministers to local councillors; from residents to trade unionist and environmentalists.  He’s paved the way for what one journalist called ‘the biggest environmental battle in Europe’

But, by coming out so clearly for Heathrow, Davies has also almost certainly forced politicians and political parties to reveal their hand before the 2015 General Election (even though his final report is not due to be published until two months after the election).  He has made Heathrow an election issue.

My hunch is that Davies’s early support for Heathrow expansion has effectively killed it.  He has put the issue firmly into the political arena where the supporters of expansion face a struggle they can probably never win.