A neighbourhood in Seattle called Laurelhurst has successfully restricted helicopter landings at the local hospital. Seattle Children's Hospital, to be specific. The complaint? The helicopters are too noisy.
Somewhere in Laurelhurst there's a person who looked at the helicopter taking a sick child to the only place that can save them, and thought yes, but what about my afternoon. And they complained.
And it worked.
The helicopter now lands a mile away, and the sick child finishes the journey by ambulance. Twenty extra minutes. For someone having the worst day of their life.
What next? Do we just ban the hospital?
The airfield was here first
Noise complainers. Up there with people who stop at the top of escalators, the reply-all merchant, and the militant walker with a compass and an OS map who knows their right of way crosses the live runway and intends to exercise it.
The airfield has been there since the war. The houses are built later, often much later. The new owners move in. They look up. They see an aeroplane. They are appalled.
It's worth being precise about what they're appalled by. It's almost never the airfield itself. It's the circuit.
There's a famous, possibly apocryphal story from Denham. A regular complainer phoned up so often that someone at the field is supposed to have told them the only person whose complaint would be taken seriously was the ninety-three year old woman in the village. She was the only resident who'd actually been there before the airfield.
You bought a house near a working airfield. The aeroplanes are not the surprise.
And it's not just airfields. Churches get told their bells are too loud. Farmers get asked to have a word with the cockerel about its timekeeping. The countryside, it turns out, has smells.
You know the type
At Elstree, where I fly, every resident PA28 has a silencer fitted, there's a no-overfly area marked on the Pooleys chart, and pilots route around it every time. We even flip the circuit direction during the day, just to keep the complainers happy.
Earls Colne airfield in Essex spells out the broader truth on its website:
Non-pilots please note: It is pointed out that noise abatement procedures cannot legally be made mandatory. It is a voluntary procedure which Earls Colne strongly advises all pilots to adhere to.
The complainers are still complaining anyway. That's not a noise problem. That's an "I don't want the airfield to exist" problem dressed up in a noise complaint costume.
You know the type. The ones who mow their lawns in geometric patterns. The ones who clocked exactly what time you put your bins out three weeks ago.
Pick two
Restrict the helicopters at a children's hospital and you don't just lose a bit of helicopter noise. You lose the air ambulance.
Same with airfields. Close one and you lose the police helicopter base, the air ambulance refuelling stop, the flight school where commercial pilots start. Two of my former co-owners on KK now fly for Jet2 and Loganair.
The same people who want every GA airfield shut down will complain when there's a shortage of pilots to fly them to the chalet in the Swiss Alps. They'll complain when the airfield gets sold because it's unviable, and the developer puts a hundred thousand houses on it, most of them affordable, spoiling their beautiful view.
You can't have it all three ways. Pick two.
Want a quiet life and a beautiful view? Don't shut down the airfield. The airfield is the thing keeping the bulldozers off it.
Want to fly to Geneva for half-term? Somebody had to learn to fly somewhere, and that somewhere was a small noisy airfield near a house.
The next time someone tells me general aviation pilots are the unreasonable ones, I'll be thinking about Laurelhurst.
