#45: Dirty Flight Paths

60 Reasons to Protest: Reason #45 – Dirty 💩 Flight Paths

The new flight paths were designed to be lower than they are at other airports. What happened?

Airservices have confirmed in Senate Estimates that they have not only received thousands of complaints from people living across 226 suburbs (there are only 190 suburbs total!). They have also received complaints from AIRLINES angry that they are forced to waste fuel and thus money in Brisbane.  Why? Planes here are required to fly arrival paths that are lower and slower and thus noisier, dirtier and less fuel efficient.

Pilots refer to “dirty” flight paths

The forced lower arrival altitudes cause 3 x more noise than at other airports. Here is why:

1. The airspace Airservices designed (their “bread  & butter “ as they say in Senate Estimates) requires pilots to level down sooner and come lower. Lower means MORE NOISE x 1. 
2. In order to do that they need to slow down, and to do that they need to extend their “flaps” on the wings earlier (see video below), which creates more thrust but also yet again MORE NOISE x 2. 🪽
3. It also creates more drag so the engines are higher powered to keep the plane in the air so that’s MORE NOISE x 3: because the engines are louder – and use more fuel. 

How did this come about? With normal arrival paths elsewhere in the world, planes often use a continuous glide path. But not in Brisbane. Here the arrival paths are lower overall, because the Airservices flight path designers did not bother redesigning the higher altitude airspace. This was one of the first issues the TRAX International team from the UK picked up and identified as a major flaw of the Brisbane airspace design. As a result the arrival paths (aka STARs) were simply squeezed into the existing flight path spaghetti  that already existed. In order to avoid crashes, the new arrival paths are BELOW existing paths. Airservices says this is due to required safety separations. While that is true, it’s not the actual reason: The actual reason is Airservices’ failure to do a holistic airspace redesign as would be standard practice for an airspace as complex as Brisbane’s. 

It is time for justice. Those responsible for this debacle need to be held to account. This includes the Airservices CEO. Other CEOs of government-owned entities have been sacked for far smaller offences, e.g. Australia Post CEO for gifting Cartier watches. Yet, Airservices CEO has been in power for years overseeing an organisation that’s completely removed from their legislated obligations and duties: to protect the people and environment from the use and effects of aircraft.

Let’s make some noise.