Look up and see the trails of pollution in the skies

SOME of your regular readers may remember that I wrote about the pollution problem associated with buses using the Market Place at the time of the pedestrianisation consultations.

In that letter I alerted residents to a change in the way pollution is measured following adoption of the revised EU rules that measure much smaller fractions of pollutants, the ones that can enter the blood stream and cause deadly illnesses and birth abnormalities.

I write again but this time to alert you to the proposals from governments and airlines to increase the capacity of flight corridors.

It is argued that by using satellite based GPS systems that ‘planes can travel closer together with less vertical and horizontal separation. Such systems will also allow for more landings during bad weather and support night-time operations, particularly for freight operators such as at East Midlands Airport; one of the few UK airports to open 24 hours-a-day.

In Loughborough we all live under a major flight corridor linking London, and other major European cities, with North America. We certainly get a lot of overhead flights and when weather conditions are favourable we can see the con trails over our town.

Last year I counted over 20 con trails at a time on many sunny days.

Unless broken up and displaced by high level air currents these trails slowly coalesce into a sheet of high level cloud. We are deprived of some of the light and warmth we should be receiving. And if the air is static, as it may be in a stable high pressure zone when sunny days are more plentiful, I ask, ‘Where do the ‘plane’s pollutants fall?’

MIT, the premier American Technology University, published an interesting paper on this recently. They state that, ‘In times when upper level winds are strong in the US, airplane pollution can travel as much as 6000 miles eastwards before falling out of the atmosphere’. (That will be about the middle of England then?)

The American Environmental Protection Agency is very aware of this increase in pollution and is pressing for better fuel efficiency from engine manufacturers and airline operators. ‘ Yet jet fuel continues to be more polluting than other modern fuels as it contains sulphurs that could be refined out of the fuel for a few cents a gallon more’.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions from this letter but I am reminded that airline operator, multi-billionaires like Branson and O’Leary pay no tax on their jet fuel.

Airlines are predicting an 80 per cent increase in flights over the next 12 years.

Isn’t it time that all politicians and legislators taxed the airplane businesses with sufficient ruthlessness so that there is no growth in air transport? This would help protect us all, particularly in Loughborough.

Nicholas Ball Spinney Hill Drive Loughborough