THE UK GOVERNMENT has decided that the absolute noise limits for airliners leaving London's three major airports should be reduced by up to 3dBA. This action, it says, will reduce noise for airport neighbours at little cost to the airlines - "only" 12% of departures of the heaviest-laden Boeing 747s being affected.
Unsurprisingly, the airlines oppose this unilateral action, and they are right: it smacks more of political expediency and opportunistic tax raising than it does of concern for the environment.
Noise is an emotive subject: what can be measured as a 3dBA reduction in sound-pressure level by clinical, unemotive, instrumentation may not be perceived by a human ear as a halving of noise.
The UK Government is erring far more to the emotive than to the scientific in its unilateral action. It is effectively trying to create a new noise standard, but one, which applies to only three airports, each of which has entirely different environmental problems.
The logical conclusion is that this move has nothing to do with a desire to improve the environment, but a lot to do with satisfying the political agenda of a government struggling to stay in power beyond the next general election.
(There is the even more startling thought that it may signal the emergence of something totally lacking in this Government's agenda for the past 17 years - a transport policy. Could it be that the Government has decided to throw its weight behind airport operator BAA's plans to develop the proposed Terminal Five at Heathrow, and that the new noise restrictions are a sweetener for that decision?)
The regulations, which govern international air transport are largely those promulgated by or through the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). That body was set up (with enthusiastic support from a previous UK Government) with the express intention of harmonising international civil-aviation regulations.
It is through ICAO that the existing three-stage noise limitations have been established and accepted by the international community. It is to the demands of Stage 3 rules that the aircraft and engine manufacturers have designed their latest products, secure in the knowledge that, in meeting those demands, they are ensuring the international acceptability of their products.
The existence of the ICAO noise rules has never been seen as disqualifying member states from imposing special operational procedures to further reduce the noise of even Stage 3-compliant aircraft. The infamous take-off regulations at John Wayne Airport in California provide the perfect example.
Those were, applied by a local authority, not by a national government, to counter a particular local problem. Draconian though they may be, because John Wayne is not a long-haul destination, they do not in general prevent operators from using their equipment in the manner intended by its manufacturers or penalise them for doing so. The London restrictions will.
The operators which will suffer from these London proposals are those using aircraft such as the Boeing 747-400 on services for which they were designed: carrying full payloads on ultra-long sectors non-stop. They will only be able to comply with the new regulations by cutting gross take-off weights. No airline, which has established the ability to fly non-stop on those sectors will abandon that advantage, but running with low payloads will harm the economics of those services.
The logical conclusion for an operator must therefore be to carry on as before, and simply to pay the fines imposed on it for exceeding the new noise limits. British Airways, the airline most affected estimates that it will have to pay fines of some $1.25 million a year on its current operations. If it buys newer, bigger, more powerful aircraft such as the proposed 747-600, however, its noise infractions (and therefore fines) will undoubtedly increase, no matter how more economically efficient those aircraft might be.
In effect, these restrictions turn out to be an ill-thought-out, hastily applied, unscientific back-door excuse for raising taxes - and this UK Government above all others should know that taxation is the most emotive subject of all.
Source: Flight International
