On Wed, 13 Jun 2018 11:31:18 +0100
John Williamson wrote:
On 13/06/2018 09:28, wrote:
On Tue, 12 Jun 2018 20:20:44 +0100
Graeme Wall wrote:
On 12/06/2018 09:50, wrote:
Flight paths are not fixed tracks in the sky, they can be adjusted to suit.
Actually they are.
They're not fixed infrastructure such as roads and rails, they can be changed
with little effort.
They are fixed to a large extent by the positioning of the runways. To
land safely, most airliners need a straight line approach exceeding 25
miles, entered from a turn of about 10 miles in radius,so for Heathrow,
they start their final approach over the Thames estuary area. For
Manston, that approach would skirt the French coast, so would need
international co-operation between air traffic controllers.
Where the 25 mile approach path is not available, pilots have a low
opinion of the safety of using the airport, and the old Hong Kong
Someone better tell London City where final approach starts over southwark
all of 6 miles away when landing from the west. Admittedly its smaller planes
but they're still airliners, not cessnas.
Air traffic control would also have a low opinion of aircraft taking off
from Manston into the densely occupied landing approach areas round
Heathrow and Gatwick. This would be even more fun when the wind changed
and all of them were taking off and landing while travelling East, so
that Heathrow and Gatwick traffic was taking off into Manston's approach
pattern.
If you lived in north london like I do you'd see airliners on approach and
departure from heathrow passing each other with minimum vertical and almost
no horizontal seperation every day.