Luton Airport apologises over increased noise
22.09.11
Luton Airport has apologised to villagers in St Albans who have suffered a sharp rise in noise due from aircraft at low altitude, the Herts Advertiser reports. Admitting some planes are not flying where they should be, it has pledged to have quieter skies over Flamstead by the end of the month. The airport has also promised to look at initiating changes to a ‘historic’ flight path affecting Redbourn residents, saying flying over less populated open countryside would be preferable.
At a Flamstead parish council meeting last week, Luton’s operations director, Neil Thompson, explained that some flights following a route near Flamstead and Redbourn were flying hundreds of metres from the centreline because of gradually changing magnetic measurements from ‘old technology’ near the airport. That was discovered following investigations into a recent rise in complaints about plane noise from Flamstead and Redbourn, with Luton establishing that navigation beacons, calibrated every five years, are out by one degree.
Planes on a flightpath between Flamstead and Markyate use information from a navigation beacon at Bovingdon. A naturally occurring phenomenon called magnetic variation has aircraft flying closer to Flamstead than they were previously. That route is 3km-wide, but because of the one degree magnetic shift, planes have been flying about 400m from the centreline, prompting residents in Flamstead and Redbourn to complain of noise from up to 120 planes a day.
Mt Thompson said: ‘Hopefully from the end of this month the aircraft should be flying that centreline again. There is no intention to disturb Flamstead. I can only apologise on behalf of the airport.’
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