Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-14-Speech-5-075"
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"en.20000414.4.5-075"2
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"Mr President, I live 10 kilometres from Malpensa airport as the crow flies and I spent all my working life as part of an aircraft control team, and I therefore feel very strongly about this issue.
First of all, I must say that many of the problems are the result of bad planning or no planning at all. The airports were built haphazardly and no practical assessment of the environmental impact was made as the towns, or certain parts of them, grew up around the airport structures. Regional planning is only a recent introduction, whereas airports have existed for a long time. The first flights to operate from Malpensa, for example, began as early as 1910.
Of course, there are other structures which are public nuisances – landfill waste sites, for example, which are created from old quarries with no planning – but, in the case of airports, we see the consequences every day, or rather we hear them, for they fill our ears rather than offending our eyes.
In addition, provision of information is poor. For example, many fingers are being pointed at cargo flights. Cargo flights generate neither more nor less noise than passenger flights. The amount of noise depends exclusively on the type of aircraft, not on what is being transported: a cargo Boeing 747 produces much less noise than a passenger Boeing 727. Consequently, a thorough knowledge of the facts is necessary even for debating purposes.
Then the legislative framework is also fairly complicated. Here, we have an example of the application of the principle of subsidiarity in its entirety, even extending beyond the European Union, for the standards are established by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which is a supranational body. I welcomed the Commission’s remarks regarding a European legislative framework. For example, as has already been said, we need to establish what is intended by the word “night”. Does night start at 10 p.m. or at midnight? Does it end at 5 a.m. or at 7 a.m.? This is something to be taken into consideration.
Another factor is the involvement of the local authorities, for every airport is different. The noise impact differs even within the same airport according to the runway used. For example, runway 25 of Fiumicino airport is next to the sea and hardly disturbs anybody at all, whereas if an aircraft were to take off from the right-hand section of runway 16 it would disturb half a million people or so from the Ostia and Fiumicino communities. Local authority involvement is therefore important, although, I must stress, it needs to be within a general European legislative framework.
In my opinion, it would, on the whole, be feasible to eliminate night flights and ban them, although, I must stress, this must be done by taking specific local factors and also the type of aircraft used into consideration. It should not make much difference whether an aircraft has a built-in silencer or whether its silencer is fitted subsequently: the engine noise can be measured and an assessment made of whether the aeroplane is excessively noisy or not, irrespective of the date of manufacture or the type of silencer used. In any case, I would stress that we must not just concentrate on the individual factors in isolation but view the issue as a whole."@en1
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