NOISE!
We spent Saturday morning at the home of one of our listeners - Sarah - who was concerned about the early morning racket from planes going into Heathrow. We saw and heard one going over at 04.30.
We thought you might be interested in this piece in The Times today: .
And this email is just in from Neil Towers: "I was interested to hear the broadcast from a home in Wimbledon.....
Night flights have been a growing issue since the mid 1990's. In an era when cocks are stopped from crowing and a butcher was prevented from doing his butchering before 8:00am it is bizarre that flights are allowed in the early morning. The 4:30 am flight over Wimbledon will probably have passed over Blackheath a few minutes earlier and this Monday was sufficiently loud to disturb me from my sleep. We are led to believe that sleep deprivation is a form of torture, but the powers that be seem more interested in residents of Guantamo Bay than South London. Has anybody evaluated the economic cost of such sleep deprivation - car accidents through lack of sleep; errors at work because of lapsed attention; children's poor learning etc. If the economic cost of such deprivation were factored into the calculations, Heathrow would probably be a liability.
There has been no mention as to the restriction of night flights in the context of the 3rd runway so it about time it was factored in. A ban on flights netween the hours of 10:00pm and 7:00am would mean that we might be able to get 9 hours sleep!"
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