Representation by Karen Leigh Franklin
- Date submitted
- 3 October 2023
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I am horrified to hear the proposed routine use of the Northern safety runway at Gatwick for multiple reasons. 1.Safety - another smart motorway disaster in the making! 2. Purely a money making exercise 3. Eco unfriendly from air pollution and noise perspective encouraging unnecessary travel. 4. No consideration of reducing night time flights like other airports which have protested 'sleep time'. In fact Gatwick reduced their landing fees at night. 5.No investment in surrounding infrastructure around Gatwick for example: roads, rail and hospitals. Lack of housing schools etc all of which are already over utilised. 6. Consultation with surrounding areas has not been impressive to date! 7.The process of complaints about complaints about noise was changed to limit one email to one plane to reduce the number of complaints- an example of how untrustworthy Gatwick management is. Another example was concentrating the flight pathways without consultation a few years ago! 8. Gatwick seems to attract the cheaper travel companies with older more noisy planes and does little to enforce planes being modified to reduce noise. Only after yet another long battle did we get specific Easyjet planes modified to reduce the untenable whine. 9. Plane descent is inadequately controlled and left up to the pilot to decide till 3000 feet! 10. For those of us lucky enough to own our own houses, we have seen them being further and further devalued due to the resultant noise from extensive expansion of planes in and out of Gatwick over the last thirty years.