For a long time now I’ve been concerned about our over-crowded skies, particularly over London.
But with increasing frequency now, we keep hearing about yet another near-miss. Now a lot of these are, low risk and minor incidents, but the fact that they keep getting reported in the media hightens my awareness.
I’m a fairly frequent flyer and am always weary coming in and out of Heathrow. I find it very un-nerving to be able to see the windows and lettering of another aircraft close by. I’m even more nervous when landing there in low cloud which I’ve done on a few occassions.
My point is; is the media over-playing this or is there a real risk out there? I am really concerned that a mid-air accident is more a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ over our skies.
Am I being over-dramatic?
By: kev35 - 29th July 2002 at 20:21
RE: Mid-Air
T5,
you state a convincing case. I don’t know about it being just London’s skies either. I suppose there is a certain statistical inevitability that one day two airliners will meet in the skies over a major population centre either through human error or some kind of systems failure. I think the crash of the EL AL 747 in Amsterdam shows how bad it might be. On that day the loss of life was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
Regards,
kev35
By: T5 - 29th July 2002 at 19:01
RE: Mid-Air
I very frequently go on about the skies of London. I’m close to Heathrow and see the air traffic going out or coming into Heathrow every day.
I’m not convinced that the media do blow such events out of proportion and I know we’re told not to believe everything we read in a newspaper but our skies our becoming worse on a daily basis.
I also questioned the proposed developments at airports over the UK; especially those in London. Surely, more terminals and more runways are going to be a reason to accept more air traffic when it can’t be controlled. Our air traffic control is falling to pieces, but is this because the staff are not trained or is it because there is too greater workload on the controllers?
The introduction of the A380 is also going to cause havoc, especially in London. Most airports will require new, longer runways to allow for the monster… yet again, more traffic in our skies.
Just how will air traffic chahnge over the coming years? Airports boast of how may passengers they handle each year and the new Airliner World top 100 airports list tells us just how dangerous the situation is. Heathrow is ranked 4th and 60,024,541 passed through in 2001. Gatwick is ranked 20th and carried 31,182,361 passengers. With Stansted (13,660,943), London Luton and London City, in excess of 100 million people fly over the country’s capital every year – and that figure is growing. The media tell us our skies our too crowded and we should believe it…
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July 29, 2002 at 3:27 pm