Representation by Brian Daubney
- Date submitted
- 8 October 2018
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
The RSP application and campaign is based on the assertion Manston needed to be saved. A derelict strip of concrete only became sought after, when it was being saved. RSP’s offshore bid depends on the unspoken appeal to a role in the Battle of Britain. Not best positioned as airfield in war, or airport in peace, Manston had been significant, at and after D-Day but has not enjoyed national importance. The RSP bid and its parliamentary spokesman already refer to the needs of a post Brexit Britain: see the Avia report on Manston in Thanet Local plan interview with [Redacted] whose views like those of the applicant overlook local geography, the major factor in earlier failures. The idea that Manston might function effectively on what is still geographically, the island of Thanet, linked to London by one single dual carriageway, is highly implausible.
Jams caused by the 2013 air show at Manston, echoing the 1948 disaster, totally closed the island to traffic for two days: a single car crash in 2014 took six hours to clear, blocking routes back to the M2 with police instructing there was no way in as they still have to do. The applicant seems unaware that East Kent lacks a modern road infrastructure, with few highways to even accommodate heavy traffic, a road pattern that is mediaeval and east of Medway, a county that is very sparsely populated. Dover and Canterbury turn to their motorway links with Gatwick and Heathrow for travel.
Unawareness of scale and infrastructure means assumptions in the application are incorrect. Skyline and urban traffic background averaging, useful around Heathrow, is irrelevant to this environment. When Manston operated, lessons under flight paths halted as jets, measured at 90db, overflew the Grammar and other schools. Kent International Airport assured monitoring but when, at noon on February 12 2012, an incoming 747 continued to discharge fuel as it crossed beach, harbour and town, soaking myself and many others, flight numbers were “too low to justify monitoring.” Attempts to report damage by vortex; jettisoned ice; low frequency vibrations and thunderous late arrivals at 3.OOam failed. RSP proposals do not manage or control noise by repeating earlier promises.
[Redacted] loved the town but hated the runway, stating it was ‘shaking the pretty place to pieces ’. He asked that his views should be made known if Manston expansion was mooted after his death. He was sure an undertaking to shorten the runway after the war was made by the USAF. Not provable in the cold war, the Inspectorate might be in a position to verify this now.
As fresh evidence of the danger of minute jet particle inhalation continues to emerge, a rejoinder from RSP’s [Redacted], ‘no one has been proved to die from pollution’, is rather symptomatic of the proposal’s lack of care.