Shake-up of London's flightpaths

A major shake-up in aircraft flightpaths across London and the South-East has been unveiled.

Landings and take-off routes from four of the five airports serving the capital are to be redrawn in a move that will affect hundreds of thousands of people and is intended to reduce delays and the total number affected by aircraft noise.

The routes, produced by National Air Traffic Services, the private company which manages air traffic control in Britain, are the first changes in decades for many areas. The alterations include:

New routes to and from Heathrow designed to affect fewer people - although they will suffer greater noise;

Moving the "stack", where aircraft queue to land for City Airport, further east in Essex and introducing a new approach to the terminal;

Doubling the number of stacks for Stansted and moving them north and east, farther from bigger towns;

Shifting the departure route from Luton so it is directly over the Chilterns.

The measures are likely to be highly controversial for those affected and are subject to a 13-week consultation.

Nats said the routes were designed to shift aircraft noise from urban to rural areas as much as possible. But it admitted it could not calculate how many people would now be subject to aircraft noise above the 57 decibel level, the crucial measure of whether or not they will feel their lives are being affected.

The moves are also designed to deal with the rapid growth in the number of flights, with a more than three-fold expansion in aircraft movements since 1975, when the patterns were established.

Nats operations director Ian Hall said: "All these airports have grown considerably in the past 20 years - London City has grown from virtually nothing since the early Nineties. Up to now we have simply accommodated this growth within the existing airspace infrastructure.

"Just like bottlenecks on our roads, increased air traffic causes congestion in the airways, meaning delays and extra fuel burn - and that has an impact on the environment. Redrawing the routes enables us to make them more efficient to reduce delays."

The scheme will create winners and losers, both likely to be measured in the hundreds of thousands.

In London, flight paths to and from Heathrow will be narrower, reducing the number of people living under them by about 39,000.

Nats estimated those in the 57 decibel area around Heathrow would fall from 249,057 to 242,651. But its consultation document warns that people inside the revised flight path will suffer worse noise because of the more intensive use of the airspace.

The biggest changes affect Luton, London City and Stansted. All three airports have undergone a massive growth in demand.

City's new approach means towns including Southend will experience less noise, but the scale of demand for the Docklands airport means the number of people affected by noise will be up 11 per cent to 11,204. But the stack for queuing planes will be moved much further north and east over the coast of Essex.

At Stansted, departure routes will mean villages east of Saffron Walden and west of Bishop's Stortford will experience more and worse noise. Its existing stack will be axed and two new ones created over Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.

Many villages in Hertfordshire between St Albans, Berkhamsted and Luton will be be under a flightpath for the first time.

The number affected by noise will double and Stevenage residents will be among those experiencing worse noise pollution.

John Stewart, chairman of anti-Heathrow expansion group Hacan, said: "No amount of tinkering with flightpaths can get round the fact that, if a new runway is built at Heathrow, over 150,000 people will find themselves under a new flightpath for the first time with aircraft coming over every 90 seconds."

The routes will have to be redrawn before 2014, when they will be unable to cope with demand. They would also be changed radically if extra runways are built at Heathrow and Stansted.