We live precisely 3 miles from the mid point of the runway at Liverpool John Lennon Airport.
I have known the airport for many years back to the time is was called Speke and had several flights a day to Heathrow and the Beatles coming & going to the delight of huge numbers of fans.
It then went into decline and I can remember when there were almost no scheduled flights and in the terminal building they announced the arrival or departure of anything that flew including small helicopters.
Then a new long runway was built alongside the Mersey shore with the very latest in electronic landing aids and I was told ‘off the record’ by a journalist friend that the whole new construction was secretly underwritten by the US military who had a vast underground storage depot full of hundreds of vehicles and field hospitals etc at the nearby old WW2 airfield at RAF Burtonwood.
Then the airport appointed a dynamic new Business Development Manager who convinced Liverpool City Council to build a new terminal building in order to persuade the rapidly expanding easyJet airline to use Liverpool as a base. They were quick to take the bait and were soon joined by Ryanair.
I was in a quandary – for years I had followed the airport’s fortunes on a local aircraft fan forum and the expansion delighted many. However with my Nimby hat on I was a bit alarmed at the amount of noise this would generate. One of the joys of living in Cressington Park is that it is had to believe that you are actually living in a city such is the peace & calm here. My mum & dad lived 18 miles from Heathrow and there was a notable amount of noise when planes were stacked overhead. I reasoned that although we would not have the same wide bodied jets the smaller planes would be a lot lower as they took off and landed.
By and large my fears turned out to be unfounded. It turns out that we actually live too close and not under any approach/departure glide paths. This means that by the time an aircraft has reached an altitude high enough to safely turn off this invisible bearing they are far enough away from us to not be anywhere near overhead. Sadly this is not the case for other suburbs and departing planes en route to Amsterdam and all points east of there fly right over the St. Michaels in the Hamlet area (where the late Nick Spalton lived) and the noise pollution there must be significant.
So finally I come to the reason for this diatribe. Sometimes aircraft noise can be definitely intrusive and there are two pre-requisites for this to happen. One is the wind direction but the other is dependant on the airline. The wind direction sounds like an obvious culprit – everyone knows that wind carries sound but in our case the direction has a secondary function. The prevailing winds in the UK follow the earth’s rotation and arrive here coming from the west and as we live almost due west of the airport most noise associated with take off & landing gets ‘blown’ away from us for maybe <90% of the time. In the more unusual times when we have easterlies we are more likely to be aware of living close to an airport but as mentioned above, there is a secondary component required for this to become intrusive. Somewhat unexpectedly this turns out to be dependant on the airline.
This is explained by the fact that easyJet exclusively operates aircraft belonging to the Airbus A320 family (A319, A320 & A321). Some of these have started to have the word Neo appended to the type and this stands for ‘New Engine Option’. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that New is going to be better than Old and this change manifests itself in two main ways – better fuel economy and less noise generated. Ryanair on the other hand exclusively operates variants of the Boeing 737.
It so happens that despite the two types of planes having similar fuel (in)efficiency the easyJet’s are a lot less noisy than the Ryanair planes. For us, the worse case scenario is a Ryanair plane landing in a stiff easterly wind. This is because when a plane touches down the pilot deploys what are called ‘Reversers’. These are flaps that come out at the rear of each engine and physically divert the thrust from backwards to forwards. He also immediately increases the power of the engine a lot for 15 or 20 seconds to bring the plane to a halt before the end of the runway. It is the suddenness of this roar that cuts through any ambient noise as it is blown towards us.
I know this is very much a First World problem and not the end of the world but it’s frustrating that as Ryanair are by far and away the main offender they don’t see it as a priority to use quieter planes …..