The following is all the entries relating to the BAA Public Consultaion in respect of the four options moved from the front page now that the consultation is closed.

BAA STANSTED CONSULTATION, TIME IS RUNNING OUT!

When all the public responses are in it could come down to simple arithmetic. If the folk in the other villages raise more objections to options “A, B & C” than us to “D”, then “D” could get it!  It doesn’t take much, a simple e-mail will do. Speak up now, we had many opportunities and this is the last chance to make a difference. Support the SSE but don’t expect much, I could be wrong but apart from smart posters, they seem to have nothing new to say and nothing they did say had any effect so far!  NO OBJECTION, IS TACIT APPROVAL!

BAA presentation March 6th in the Memorial Hall.

It took a while but I aired all my concerns with the people who came to the village to present the BAA master plans. At various times I was talking to representatives at various levels of seniority plus a man from the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority)

The issue of the close proximity of the option “D” runway to the existing one was dealt with by the man from the CAA but I’m not completely happy with the outcome. In the old days we spoke of “Near misses” more recently the phrase was “Air Misses” but now it is an “Airprox incident”. With option “D” the two runways are only 450M apart but when two aircraft approach within a mile, its too close, in flight, it is an incident requiring formal investigation and hazard assessment. In the event of a go-around on the new runway I envisaged that another aircraft could be taking off from the old one bringing them to about one third of their regulatory safe separation distance. The CAA answer was that in close parallel segregated mode the departing flight would be held until the incoming flight was safely on the ground (this was not clear in the published master plans). With planes coming and going at a rate of one a minute, I suggested that this might be difficult to say the least. The answer however was that there was an existing major airport managing with just such a scenario. (in fact two runways even closer together than option “D”) Of course I am only concerned with our airport and don’t recognise the fact that there is somebody worse off as a justification for second best, especially where lives are being subjected to calculated risks.

We then discussed the PSZ (Public safety zone) which the CAA was quick to identify as the small area off the end of the runway which I equally quickly identified as the area where the risk of being killed was 1 in 10,000 to which the CAA response was but of course nobody is permitted to live there. I stated that a risk of 1 in 10,000 was so high that current public opinion would not accept it as the edge of an acceptable risk contour. The answer was that PSZ risk contours were plotted for probabilities of 1 in 100,000 and 1 in 1,000,000 as well but of course I was looking for the figure of 1 in 10,000,000 which is where current risk assessment (e.g. BSE) seemed to cut off. The contours mentioned (100,000 and 1 in 1,000,000) took in the whole airport site and had given the CAA some concerns in the context of public roads passing through those areas. It was confirmed that at 1 in 10,000,000 some at least of Bishops Stortford would be inside it. The CAA response to pressure was that if analysis and assessment required it the on-airport roads would be routed through tunnels. I could not get him to consider risks beyond their calculated contours however and couldn’t therefore get him to comment on hazards off airport property. He did suggest that such contours would be long and narrow which I disputed because standing orders would require that flight paths curved to avoid adjacent runway airprox incidents and would therefore be more widely spread according to the turning circles of the various aircraft and their loadings. Nobody really wanted to talk about the Korean Cargo Jumbo crash!

I also gave the BAA Stansted people a hard time in respect of roads. (Their term is surface access.) What brought the more senior man into play was the question that given a road is lost under the development and a replacement has to be built outside the airport perimeter, who would pay. The answer was categorical, BAA will pay. This seemed too easy so I probed further. I asked that given that we currently enjoy access to the new A120 etc, when Hall road ends up going nowhere will BAA build us a new junction and an access road to it. The answer was “if that’s what the people want then yes” That is where I spotted the flaw. It does not matter where a new road is sited there will be opposition to it. BAA pointed out that, already, what we regard as highly desirable access Takeley folk regard as a very undesirable rat-run.

There is another consultation going on. Mr R Franklin attended the meeting on our behalf and between us we produced an impressive list of issues. We must be alert to this consultation as this is make or break for our future surface access. It would be terrible for us to beat off plan “D” only to see our lives wreaked anyway by being unable to either get to work or get back after. When they realised how keenly we felt on the access issue they referred it all to the coming Faber Maunsell consultation. At present we have only seen  “Stansted Generation 2 Development Consultation with Key Stakeholders on Stopping up and Diversion Issues Briefing Note” only one representative from each group was allowed and Ray stood in as John Hurwitz was unavailable.

No BAA names are given in the above, all requests to quote statements made were hastily declined or watered down to useless. As far as I could tell from their words, nobody had any authority to make formal comment outside the published documents. All were most helpful in assisting us to understand the material on show but were unable to carry any of the issues further.

All were keen however to stress that all concerns be written down and sent in. I overheard one such case which I am sure we will hear repeated often in the future. A gentleman and his next door neighbour had shared access via a narrow track. The compulsory purchase will take his neighbour’s property but leave him with a panoramic view of the airport and his property virtually worthless.

On the subject of the short link road to Coopers End roundabout Cllr Catherine Dean’s words of assurance were not confirmed! As far as those BAA persons approached were aware Uttlesford DC were against the link road and wanted it closed to protect “our” roads from becoming rat-runs to airport traffic. We are of course the “rats” and Uttlesford don’t seem to be representing us properly. If it is only a misunderstanding however it needs resolution with some urgency. If all our traffic has to go via Stansted Mountfitchet then of course nobody is then going anywhere, these roads barely cope now and since we have come to enjoy the improved M11 and new A120 access traffic has increased overall with new property developments.

As an interesting aside I said to one BAA man, “we get an awful lot of high speed emergency services traffic through the village, far more than we would expect, are they yours”? The answer was yes! Every airport incident attracts the appropriate emergency services call-out and the route used depends entirely on where the available resource happens to be! The following discussion about the state of Chapel Hill, Grove Hill and Birchanger Services roundabout etc confirmed that the loss of Hall road would be a safety issue to them too. The biggest issue is however the threat to the gravel quarry and landfill operations as those vehicles could not safely use existing alternative routes.

As an afterthought I brought up the old issue of the proposed back-up runway. I suggested that If the SSE or Sir Alan Haselhurst succeeded in blocking the new runway this facility would need urgent consideration bearing in mind the, by then, greatly increased level of air traffic since its original requirement was identified. I also asked that even if the new runway got the go-ahead the need for the back-up would already have become acute. It was confirmed that BAA already had full planning permission to build this extra runway. Then it got interesting, in a discussion on that old planning application it was revealed by BAA that the threshold requirement for it was not the pending 35 million approval but the currently fully approved 25 million. It then got a bit ragged as the BAA rep realised I was thinking about a back-up runway being used as a close-parallel segregated mode interdependent as in “D”. When it was noted that the back-up was too close it was pointed out that so was the option “D” runway ref CAA Airprox rules and the discussion was tactfully terminated by BAA as this issue was too far outside his brief!

A Letter from the House of commons

I got off to a very bad start with the Rt Hon Sir Alan Haselhurst MP by taking his first letter too literally and misunderstanding his intentions. Up until now I had associated him very closely with the SSE but it would seem the truth is more that they both have the same overall aim. Sir Alan is working to stop the new runway but he is doing it through his sphere of influence, the commons etc. The SSE sets such store by emotional propaganda and slogans and seem to have run out of new material so all we are getting from them is ever more extravagant claims and bigger and better posters. All the objections the SSE trots out is the same stuff that has been said before at every opportunity going right back to the days of the green paper. Nothing made the slightest difference then nor did it have any effect on the White Paper as that went through the House of Commons. When the High Court legal challenge to the White Paper was over, again those objections were seen to have had no affect on the judgement. Now we are expected to believe that everything that has gone before can be overturned by basically more slogans.

I believe that the time has come to accept the very real possibility that the Government is so determined that the new runway is unstoppable but where it goes may yet be influenced by the consultation. If I am right then now is the time to look to your own homes. Raise the strongest objections you can come up with, to the options which do you the most harm. No matter which option is chosen tremendous damage will be done to our communities, roads etc. We need to be winning concessions and securing funding to restore the basic facilities we need, not ten years after we lose them but starting soon, so that for example new roads open as old ones are dug up.

This is where Sir Alan is being most helpful. I’ve now had four letters and exchanged a great many e-mails through all of which he has explained the historical roots of all our main road developments and has helped with information on the DfT’s activities in the context of further road and rail developments. I wont be reproducing these letters verbatim I will be using the information as the basis for further research so that after the Consultation period has ended this web-site will switch to identifying lost resources and campaigning for replacements. To do this properly it is vital that the information be correct, for example, I reported the chip-shop petition that basically said “sign up or lose our access to the airport roads etc” I signed it assuming as did everybody else that it was BAA about to do it to us. UDC Cllr Catherine Dean has just pointed out that this was in fact totally wrong. The local access road we use to get onto Coopers End roundabout was subject to a UDC planning permission clause such that it was to close two years after the whole airport road system was complete. BAA actually applied to have the closure postponed for another two years.

Just to balance things up a little, some views in support of the expansion, before you condemn this consider some of the issues but from a view point say 50 miles away. We are the selfish NIMBYs to them!

When you raise an objection please take the time to ensure that its a real one, so many people get a warm feeling when they think they are striking a blow for the planet they tend to lose their grip on the realities. The stark reality is that the future growth of air traffic will happen, people will want to travel more and more freight will have to be moved. If for no other reason then the global population itself is growing and modern business is becoming ever more global. If folk want to use our airport and we succeed in stopping them, do we save all that fuel? No of course we don’t, we make the flights longer to wherever will take them, then if that extra fuel wasn’t bad enough then we need tons more fuel for the lorries, cars and coaches etc to bring it/them all back again to where they wanted to be, here. Please note its no longer Stansted Airport its London Stansted Airport.

Air pollution is also weak as a challenge because aircraft and fuels have become a lot cleaner over the years and fuel dumping has turned out to be a complete red herring. Forget Carbon Dioxide emissions too, the current wisdom coming from the scientific community is that CO2 level fluctuates with global temperature rather than causes it. CO2 it seems never was a significant greenhouse gas. What little global temperature rise there has been was just enough to recover from the previous period of cooling caused by high levels of volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere. Satellite weather data is now replacing old style meteorology station based computer weather models because the global warming and climate change they predicted just didn’t happen. Rising sea levels also stop being a threat because real data rather than flawed computer predictions has actually shown sea level in some parts of the world going down.

Then there is light pollution, a few dazzled bats and confused moths is nothing compared with the criminal’s paradise that cutting back on lighting would cause. We can’t claim harm from BAA’s lights then lobby for more street lights ourselves.

Its useful also to understand who we are fighting, led by the CBI the business community is very supportive of BAA. Also consider the thousands who either work directly for BAA or for employers who are dependent on BAA. Then finally consider the thousands who want the new jobs. Its not just Us versus BAA. BAA is following the Government’s stated policy, there is a political agenda and a National long term plan.

Catherine Dean does not accept my views and has asked me to post hers on this web-site with mine, what follows has been copied directly from her e-mail. Anybody else wishing to contribute a point of view is equally welcome to do so. If there are a lot I will open some new pages.

Geoff has written that we will not be able to stop a second runway being built and that we should be against Plan D in the consultation document, as this is the option most damaging to Elsenham. I have to disagree with this. It is the view of Uttlesford District Council and SSE that a second runway is by no means a certainty. And in fact anyone who attended the recent public meeting held by SSE at the Rhodes Centre will have heard Sir Alan Haselhurst say the same thing. Singling out any option as the best or the worst will only lead BAA to proclaim that there is indeed a favoured option.

Option D is certainly the worst option for Elsenham, but none of the options will be "good" for Elsenham, nor for this area. In replying to the consultation I would urge readers to state their opposition to any second runway at Stansted, giving the reasons for this, of which there are many: environmental devastation, greater noise, air and light pollution, damage to health from noise, poor air quality, sleep deprivation and stress, effect on children who live close to or whose schools are close to the airport, more homes needed to accommodate airport workers and possible building on green belt,lack of infrastructure (the M11 and A120 measures were planned for 15 million passengers), unsustainability of air travel given the rise in global warming, lack of a convincing economic case for expansion ...........
 
Just say "NO SECOND RUNWAY"
 
 Catherine Dean

In accepting the above my e-mail to Catherine Dean included some of the following.

I have always advocated opposing the option doing the most harm. The reason I am so dead set against "D" is not just because I live in Elsenham. If there is a repeat of the recent crash I want a few acres of busted trees not hundreds of dead Bishops Stortford people. This is why I think Uttlesford should be supporting me in especially condemning “D”.
 
I do think that the SSE etc will fail again. That does not mean I don't think they should try, it means that we should be able to fall back to prepared positions. Positions we need to be preparing now. John Hurwitz has picked up on the Hall Road issue but his article did not emphasise that Hall road is doomed with all options and was nearly closed last year, plus we could lose our easy access to the new A120 and M11 anytime BAA chooses, its their roundabout and link! Look at BAA’s map (Plan 1), their boundary meanders about such that to the Southeast a lot of “our” road is on the wrong side of the boundary e.g. theirs already.

Geof

The following just in from Peter Sanders SSE Chaiman. It would be good to have a forum but they always get abused. One more and I’ll set up a separate set of pages.

Sir Alan Haselhurst and Catherine Dean are quite right. We must make clear our outright opposition to all BAA’s options. If we start saying that we prefer this option or that we shall be playing into BAA’s hands.

The outcome of BAA’s proposals is not a done deal. Geoff Woollvin says that full use of the existing runway has already been approved. It has not, and we in SSE are still opposing it. As for the second runway, it is highly unlikely that it will ever get built because it would not be not just an environmental disaster but a commercial disaster as well.

So please make clear your outright opposition to all BAA’s options for a second runway so that your views are registered among the responses to the consultation. The closing date is 24 March. Some of our members have chosen to use the BAA questionnaire, completing relevant sections as appropriate and adding comments in the space provided. Others, including many local councils, are writing letters to make their views known and copying their responses to their local MP and District Council. The postal address for your response is BAA Stansted, Freepost CL4055, Chelmsford, Essex CM1 3BR.

Peter Sanders
Chairman, SSE.
 

I actually agree with a lot of this its just that I expect BAA to ignore anything that doesn’t line up with the White Paper and the High Court judgement on it. As to the current ongoing expansion programme an increase up to 25 million is a done deal, the A120 roads are in the M11 motorway junction has been upgraded and new car parks have been built. Look to the sky, the planes are coming and going more frequently now than ever before and new destinations are appearing. Oppose it by all means but I think we are all too late to make a difference to that part of BAA’s programme. The next phase takes the existing runway up to 35 million, and I can think of no new material to use as ammunition to stop it, everything has been said to no avail.

Geof

Below this point is all the stuff I’ve written that has prompted the above. I have yet to see anything however to make me change my mind. As a point of accuracy I have never advocated expressing support for any option. I also make absolutely no apologies for putting the interests of our village first, its our web-site. I am not completely selfish however, my main thrust has been in defence of the people of Bishops Stortford. That Korean 747 cargo plane crash really worried me. Suppose option “D” gets it, use your own map. Measure from the existing runway to where it dropped  (to the southwest of Gt Halingbury) now draw the same line but from the southwest end of the Option “D” runway, then accept that accidents do happen. Its all a question of probabilities then and arguing about what is an acceptable level of risk. I don’t want to go there I just want option “D” abandoned, now.

Geof

I have just read the Village Magazine and I’m very disappointed, so many people haven’t actually read the BAA document and seem to be clinging to the idea that they can somehow turn the clock back and oppose the forthcoming Airport Expansion. The White Paper was published after a massive consultation programme (closed 12 April 2001) at which we were poorly represented (we lost). The White Paper was the Government’s stated policy document placing the new runway here. When the White Paper withstood its legal challenge (we lost again) the last impediment was then gone and everything stepped up a gear. With the launch of this new consultation phase the issue now is:

ITS COMING! WHERE DO YOU WANT IT?

Read the BAA text, understand the options, oppose the one that does us the most damage (in writing). Others in the other villages will be doing the same but working as hard as they can to stick it in our backyard by opposing the ones that affect them. They are defending their homes the way I’m trying to get you to defend yours (and mine). The alternatives now are very sparse, soon our options will be down to civil disobedience and moronic chants. It never works but it always happens! Are you going to go and sit in the mud in front of the bulldozers knowing that you had a chance to make a proper difference and couldn’t be bothered?  Support the SSE by all means but not as a substitute for positive action.

At last people are starting to wake up to the threat posed by the closure of Hall Road. Sadly however they are talking in terms of opposing it. The time for this was pre April 2001 and the opportunity was wasted. I know letters were written after this date but the consultation was by then closed and the Government’s decision made. It does not matter which option is finally accepted Hall Road will be going nowhere. Go and look at the maps I’ve been banging on about all these years. We probably don’t even get as long as it takes to build the runway. Last year BAA served notice to close the road using the sections it already owns. What stopped them was I believe the fact that some of their staff lived this side. The petition in the chip-shop will have made no difference. We cannot waste time on worthless rhetoric we must start working towards the provision of new access roads now as it will take such a long time. We risk gridlocks lasting most of every day if we delay.

I’ve had a reply to my letter, it does not contain any confidentiality clauses so I am reproducing it here.

“Thank your for your response.

For the purpose of identifying differences between our short-listed options at this stage of the process we have, on the issue of third party risk, used the NATS model which the Department for Transport (DfT) itself uses to establish Public Safety Zones at all relevant airports in the UK.

We have done this because we want to be consistent with DfT practices and data. BAA has to take the proposals through the rigors of the planning process where they will be thoroughly scrutinised, and will ultimately require the approval of the Secretary of State, who will consider these practices and data when taking a decision. 

Thank you again for getting in touch.

Regards

BAA Stansted Consultation Team”

I am not sure I fully understand what is being said here but I think I am being told that a new runway does not have to be any safer than any other anywhere in the UK. If this is so then if its OK to land and take off from airports within cities then we should not worry about overflying a town. My point however was that any aircraft getting into difficulties over a city can divert. We seem to be where many such flights divert to. My other point was that since those other airports were approved the whole Nation has become far more risk averse. Put under some pressure the Secretary of State may find that some previously acceptable levels of risk are no longer tenable. Finally, I think that, given that the four options are clearly not equally safe the least safe “D” should be abandoned but that is clearly not going to happen unless there is a massive public response to that effect.

Geof

My Letter to BAA. (CLICK HERE TO READ IT)

I have put together a letter opposing option “D” and sent it. My background to this letter was some years ago when a large plane passed over the village very low. I reported it as well outside what we understood was its proper flight path. What I received by way of a reply worried me as I was told it was a response to very bad weather and a safety issue to the aircraft. Now I understand it was in fact a go-around. Go-arounds happen when for whatever reason, landing approaches are aborted. When such an abort happens late in the landing the pilot has to go to full power to regain safe flying speed as soon as possible, engine noise considerations being set aside in the interests of safety. It then appears that normal preferred tracks are also ignored in the interests of getting back to the the beginning of the approach as soon as possible unless the pilot is required to abort completely and go right back to the holding stack. What worried me was that under adverse conditions, in the interests of safety to the aircraft, the controllers were routing aircraft directly over us. Just when one would have thought aircraft would be routed over open country they were in fact allowed to fly low over heavily built up areas. Since that time I have heard many aircraft very noisily flying low and well off noise preferential routes but I’ve not reported them as there seemed little point.

Option “D” points the new runway almost directly at Bishops Stortford but limits the use of that runway to landing or taking off but not both at once. This means that under normal conditions aircraft will not land or take off by flying over the town. Poking around on the Internet I can’t find figures for Stansted but I have found a NATS information sheet on Gatwick from which it seems that aborted landings at or a bit above the rate of one a day are not unusual for a busy airport the size of Gatwick. One phrase in the NATS information sheet concerned me as follows “Frequently aircraft divert after two go arounds due to fuel consumption.” I am fairly sure that the diversion destination of choice would be Stansted. I got this from passenger reports elsewhere on the Internet describing exactly the above scenario and ending up at Stansted. If this is so we are likely to be receiving more than our fair share of aircraft with problems. To read the NATS document click on the text highlighted above.

With option “D” an aborting aircraft coming from the north-east must not veer left as this would take it into where other aircraft could be taking off. I therefore surmised that the majority of aborting aircraft would pass over Bishops Stortford in order to go-around. The rest of my letter was concerned with statistics looking at probabilities, albeit very low, of a crash on the town. Such a crash however would have very dire consequences. We are still mindful of the recent loss of a jumbo cargo plane in Hatfield Forest, not quite the same scenario in that I understand it was taking off but it simply underlines the fact that accidents do happen and I was thinking along the lines of incoming flights with faults, damage or even terrorist activity that could make landing more difficult. The first stage of a go-around is exactly the same as a take off, the more so the closer the plane was to the ground when touch down was aborted. Arriving after a long flight however fuel load will be low unlike a proper take-off with full tanks. While this greatly reduces the fire and explosion risk in a crash, it leads to other concerns especially if the plane has flown further than planned and has already had a couple of go-arounds somewhere else.

The Secretary of State controls risks to persons on the ground via a figure of 1 in 10,000 persons killed by an aircraft accident per year, as a Public Safety Zone PSZ, or rather the opposite, its a mandatory public exclusion zone to prevent deaths at this level. In my mind however I took a very low accident rate per flight but multiplied it by a very high death rate per crash. Lacking hard figures I nevertheless wondered if 1 in 10,000 persons killed on the ground per year (See BAA’s Generation 2 Glossary) was relevant to today’s governmental attitudes to public safety taking its reaction to BSE as a guide. My thought was that should a modern public safety risk standard be re-evaluated at 1 in 10,000,000 as it seems to have been in other contexts (BSE and now bird flue?). It might not be possible to place the new runway such as to be able to exclude everybody from such a “tolerable” risk with option “D”. If the Secretary of State regards a maximum tolerable risk to be 1:10,000 per year, the implication is that a risk of 1:10,001 is somehow tolerable! Surely we can blow that clean out of the water!

By writing this I am hoping to set other people’s thoughts off along possibly similar lines. Its no good throwing up objections like noise, pollution, loss of property etc because its all been said before to no avail but public safety is an issue this government cannot ignore. If anybody has any further information along the lines of the above that might strengthen or endorse my efforts, contact me and I’ll send you a copy of what I wrote or better, please write your own letter independently and send it to.

Freepost  CL 4055
BAA Stansted
Chelmsford
CM1 3BR

Or e-mail it as an attachment to   stanstedrunway2@baa.com   I did both!

BAA Consultation.

This is getting serious, I am hearing of quite prominent people talking about supporting the “no new runway option” while I am trying to get them to put together a strong Elsenham supporting contribution to the Consultation Programme. The time for the “no vote” was back at the original Consultation and the chance was wasted, we lost. There was another opportunity while the legal challenge to the White Paper was going through, the challenge failed. Now since Justice Sullivan’s ruling, the option of “no new runway” no longer exists. You are not going to get to vote on it, the option is no longer on the table but you could make a difference as to where it goes.

I could be wrong but in case I’m right, respond to the consultation firmly against option “D” now while you still can, continue to support the SSE campaign by all means but be ready for its failure.

The SSE has failed at every stage so far.

The stage is fast approaching where the National Interest is going to be served irrespective of the locals, the SSE will then be at the forefront of the sit-down protests in front of the bulldozers, they will probably fund the squatter camps, the tunnellers and the tree-people but they will ultimately lose, surely you have all seen it all before many times over, all over the country. The fact that this time its you makes no difference!