Recently in Noise Category

Today and tomorrow the participants in Europe's Green Regional Aircraft (GRA) programme are in Caserta, Italy to get the technical activity underway. Briefly, GRA is one of the six strands of the all-important Clean Sky research programme. That in turn is the pan-European research effort aimed at helping industry achieve the continent's environmental targets in aviation. GRA accounts for €174 million of Clean Sky's €1.6 billion over seven years.

It's the annual conference of the Conservative Party in the UK. Regardless of how thrilling or otherwise you may find this, the fact is that they are very publicly committing to actions that stand an excellent choice of forming the manifesto of the next national government.

And a huge commitment they made today was to confirm beyond any doubt that they do not intend to go ahead with approving a third London Heathrow runway. That came from shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers. Their leader David Cameron said as much before, and so did London's Conservative mayor Boris Johnson (although he has his own unique wrinkle on the argument). Now there's no going back.

They'll be spending the money on high-speed rail from major northern cities and London instead.

The declaration has had predictably but decidedly mixed receptions as reported here in The Guardian and here by the BBC. This of course is not a debate that lends itself to neat conclusions - but the "false choice" between air and rail argument does seem relevant.

In the reasonably plausible event of the next election ending with a Conservative victory but a 'hung' parliament, the Tories could count on the Liberal Democrats for support on this issue.

At one point it looked as if the war was won over the proposed third Heathrow runway. The UK Labour government was onside and supporters were cautiously confident. But one way or another the whole debate is up for grabs again - particularly since the Conservatives took everyone by surprise and said they won't support it if they get in. So today BAA, through the Future Heathrow grouping, turned up the pressure with the backing of 100 entities of various sorts, but overwhelmingly from the business community, and in large part from the financially muscular end of the sector.

At time of writing it has to be said that this Monday press release wasn't actually getting a lot of traction - but the names are actually pretty impressive and will certainly give the Conservatives food for thought.

Suppose you'd been appointed to run London's three big airports, at a time when your company had become a kind of PR joke, and your biggest customers wanted that company to be forcibly broken up....what would you say? New BAA CEO Colin Matthews gave his first big speech today and he chose to say this. Boy does he want that third Heathrow runway!


Matthews, correctly I think, homes in on the critical issue of the value that Heathrow's role as a hub, with its associated transit traffic, brings to the UK. Or doesn't bring. That's the question.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has produced a good round-up study of the FAA and NASA national noise-reduction programmes.