Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
•
a new noise insulation scheme, as part of which night freight operators are charged
more for operating at night;
•
a community fund to be set up to receive charges from airlines that operate air-
craft beyond agreed noise criteria; all proceeds go to the local community, envi-
ronmental projects and insulation of homes within a defined noise contour;
•
recruitment from the immediate community;
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noise-preferential routes for truck access.
The airport company has been keen to point out that an estimated 1700 jobs depend
upon night-time activities at the airport, including around 500 employed directly by
DHL (Spooner, 2001). Proposals to restrict night-time operations by the airport's
local planning authority, North West Leicestershire District Council, provoked a
response of 53 per cent in favour of restrictions and 47 per cent against. This high-
lights the uncertainty of the planning system because this authority did not object to
the proposed development of the sortation hub when the planning application was
submitted and approved in 1998. As discussed above in the context of events at Cologne
and Nuremburg airports, such restrictions could potentially have a major negative
impact on DHL's ability to deliver a network operation by increasing supply-chain
times and costs for all of the firms that depend upon DHL's service standards. The
actual implications of this proposal have yet to be quantified but are likely to be
national and international in scale, given the role of East Midlands as a key hub in
DHL's intra-European and European-North American network operations.
The issues identified and discussed above can now be brought together and syn-
thesized in order to understand the different possible operational conditions that the
integrators may have to face in the near future. What follows is a set of four con-
trasting and conjectural visions of possible outcomes to resolving the conflicts
between integrators' operations and community concerns.
V
ISIONS
OF
THE
FUTURE
Visions of the future (1) - regulation of night-time operations
Night-time bans already apply at many airports and, as discussed above, there is grow-
ing pressure to implement them elsewhere. It is therefore quite possible to envisage
the equivalent of the London airports' 'quota count system' being applied to airports
such as East Midlands. Such a system (based upon London Heathrow) combines five
components: the determination of a night period (eg 23:00-07:00); the definition
of aircraft noise levels according to an agreed metric (eg effective perceived noise
level - or 'EPNdB'); their categorization into a set of discrete bands (eg six bands
between <90 and >102 EPNdB); a weighting scheme for each noise band (eg an air-
craft with a noise level of >102 EPNdB carries a penalty 16 times greater than an
aircraft emitting between 90 and 92.9 EPNdB); and, finally, an agreed annual noise
quota (eg 9750). For aircraft with a weighting of 1 (eg emitting 90 to 92.9 EPNdB),
the maximum number of movements permitted would be identical to the agreed
noise quota - 9750; however, if all aircraft were operated with a penalty weight of 4
(eg emitting 96 to 98.9 EPNdB), the equivalent maximum number of movements
