It has been the talk of the town during the last year.
Lelystad Airport, the new to develop airport in the
polder of the “self-built” Dutch province Flevoland was designed to function as
an overflow valve for Schiphol Amsterdam Airport, in
order to relieve this mainport from its “dreaded”, low-budget charter
passengers that bring in too little money and sales.
Due to government regulation based upon the maximum
allowed hindrance for the Dutch citizens caused by noise pollution and polluted
air coming from the national airport, Schiphol has a flight cap of roughly
500,000 slots (i.e. flights) per
year. And this maximum number of flights
per year has been approaching with a bedazzling speed.
By employing Lelystad Airport as the designated charter
flight airport, Schiphol would be able to keep the more lucrative transit and
business passengers in Amsterdam and still remain within the maximum number of
slots per year. The charter passengers would then be banished to the polder
where on a “pasture” in the middle-of-nowhere their flight would leave to their
sunny destinations.
This was the plan!
Even though the maximally planned 45,000 flights per
annum for Lelystad Airport would only be a drop in the ocean for the ever
growing, ever slot-hungry airport Schiphol, it was a beginning.
The employment of Lelystad Airport had to be done in
combination with the execution of Schiphol’s further plans to bend and massage the
maximum number of 500,000 slots per year to a slightly higher number of say
520,000 – 530,000 slots per year.
Schiphol tried to do this via a broad and cunning lobby
with direct access to ‘The Hague’, in combination with new arithmetical ways of
measuring the noise pollution from the national airport.
As a matter of fact, Schiphol’s measurements of noise pollution
were (virtually) never based upon real life checks with microphones and other
sensitive measuring equipment on all kinds of locations close to the airport.
No, with the help of computer models and algorithms, the
amount of noise pollution was calculated for the different living areas close
to Schiphol, based upon weather data, physical data for sound transfer and
known physical noise data from existing airplanes.
These calculations were made by research institutes that
had traditionally strong ties with Schiphol, such as the National Aviation and
Spacetravel centre (i.e. NLR) in The Netherlands. And the results were laid
down in a so-called Environmental Effects Report (i.e. MER in Dutch).
Last year, a new MER was produced by Schiphol that
“disclosed” that growth of almost 5% in the number of 500,000 slots would be
feasible, due to a new way of measuring the noise pollution and due to the fact
that the future airplanes would become more silent, fuel efficient and modern
in the coming years.
Silent and fuel efficient engines were the panacea that
would enable the further necessary growth for Schiphol on both Schiphol itself,
as well as on Lelystad Airport.
Everybody happy, right?! Wrong!
Unfortunately for Schiphol, a few people – among which
the now “infamous” ICT engineer Leon
Adegeest – ran the gauntlett and started to thoroughly check Schiphol’s Environmental
Effect Report for Lelystad Airport. They found it to be laden with calculation errors,
deliberate(?) false measurements and perhaps a lot of wishful thinking.
The following snippets are from NOS.nl, from an article of October,
2017:
When
an airplane flies on low altitude, this causes more noise pollution than when
an airplane flies on high altitude. There is nothing strange about that.
Nevertheless, in research from the National Aviation and Spacetravel centre NLR
into the environmental effects and the accompanying noise pollution coming from
Lelystad Airport, it was quoted totally differently.
In
the data that had been used in the research, it was stated that an airplane on
900 meters altitude does not cause noise pollution. Leon Adegeest of the action
group HoogOverijssel (i.e. High Overijssel) became very suspicious and started
an investigation himself.
Two weeks
ago the error in the calculation of the ministry was discovered. “The ministry
used airplane characteristics for landing and take off, that were totally
unrealistic and produced extremely low noise statistics as a consequence of
this lack of realism”, according to Adegeest. “In our investigation we used more
realistical profiles and therefore we found soon where the differences came
from”.
These discoveries by Adegeest, as well the never
desisting lobby on the social media of Adegeest and his sympathizers (including yours truly) put the
floodgates open with respect to Lelystad Airport. An old Minister for the
Environment even invented the verb “Schiphollen” for not telling the truth and
rigging the results of scientific investigations.
Suddenly all Environmental Effects Reports and other
information regarding possible passenger growth coming from the likes of
Schiphol, were distrusted by the Dutch people: not only for Lelystad Airport,
but also with regards to Schiphol itself. The people felt for the umpteenth
time betrayed by their government with unreal data and much too optimistical
stories about the positive effects of aviation in The Netherlands, while
totally ignoring the negative effects of this passenger growth for safety and
national health.
The Dutch people living in the mid-country provinces felt
sacrificed for the interests of Schiphol and Lelystad Airport, especially when
it became clear that airplanes coming from Lelystad Airport would remain on a
very low altitude (approximately 2 kilometers) for hundreds of kilometers, in
order not to interfere with the airplanes taking off from Schiphol itself.
After this situation had festered for a few months, the
new Minister for Infrastructure and Waterworks, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, could
hardly do anything else than postponing the opening of Lelystad Airport
from early 2019 to 2020 or even later.
And now the mess for Schiphol was complete: their
cherished Lelystad Airport would remain closed for at least one more year, with
an increasing risk that it would never open at all. This as a consequence of mounting
public pressure upon the political leaders and the increasing odds of losing
the business case, due to environmental hazards.
On top of that, also Schiphol’s own MER was put under intensified scrutiny as a
consequence of the errors in the MER for Lelystad Airport and the assumption
that Schiphol’s MER could be error-prone itself due to flawed calculations
based upon wrong assumptions. This put the desired expansion of the number of
slots under serious jeopardy.
As a matter of fact the whole business model of Schiphol
and the airlines it services is based on unhampered, steady growth until
“eternity”. Every year Schiphol wants more globally operating airlines, more
slots, more passengers, more freight, more destinations and more sales in their
countless shops, restaurants and bars and real estate buildings. In their world
standing still means trailing behind the global competition.
This was the reason that Schiphol, and especially the
whole aviation industry connected to the national airport, wrote a
pressing letter to the press, thus ringing the alarm bell ‘for the future
of the airport’.
Here are the pertinent snippets from an AD-article:
When
the cabinet decides to lock up Schiphol up to and including 2020, this will
come at the expense of employment, the establishment climate for new businesses
and the attainableness [of The Netherlands – EL] as a whole. This warning was administered by various
stakeholders of Schiphol, among which KLM, Easyjet, Corendon, travel
organization ANVR, labour unions CNV and VNV and the logistical industry organizations
TLN and Evofendex.
The
number of flights that comes and goes to and from Schiphol has almost reached
its peak level of 500,000 flights per year. Recently the cabinet decided not to
water down the agreements with respect to this number of flights up to and
including 2020. By doing this, the government does not wait for the results of
a new report with respect to the reduction of hindrance for the people living
around Schiphol, according to the parties involved.
In a
joint statement, these companies speak of an unresponsable blockade of the
airport and they want to quickly deliberate with minister Cora van
Nieuwenhuizen of Infrastructure, in order to come to “appropriate agreements”.
The parties point towards a paragraph in the government agreement, regarding
more silent and clean airplanes, that leaves room for further growth.
Of course I understand these people. When your whole
business case is based upon the notion that you have to grow over and over
again in order to stay in the business, this letter makes very much sense.
And of course, even when Schiphol plays a “neutral role”
in this letter (see the unprinted remainder of this article in the AD newspaper),
in order to not offend the Dutch national government, it is logical that the
airport also wants to grow to at least 600,000 slots per year.
Nevertheless, as the situation around Lelystad Airport
already showed out, it is extremely complicated to accommodate more than half a
million flights per year in a very small country like The Netherlands;
especially when these flights have to take off and land on no less than 5 main
airports (Schiphol Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Lelystad and Maastricht
Aachen Airport) within a very limited amount of air space. And all these
airports need to have their own slice of the air space pie in order to service
their passengers quickly and safely.
The fact that flights from Lelystad have to remain at two
kilometers of altitude for dozens or hundreds of kilometers of their flight
path shows how darn difficult it is to offer safe airspace for all these
travellers. And this will only become worse when Schiphol Airport wants to grow
to say 600,000 slots.
Of course, what all these airliners and other stakeholders
of Schiphol want to point out with their letter is not only fearmongering.
Things might indeed become a little harder for these stakeholders when Schiphol
can’t grow anymore… But it is not as if their sheer future and existence is on
the line when further growth is not possible!
A situation of unhampered growth for aviation in The
Netherlands is utopian, due to the limited air space, the very dense population
and the consequential safety precautions that must be above average to keep the
Dutch people safe.
It is just not so that the whole current air fleet visiting
The Netherlands will turn into green, electrical airplanes alone tomorrow and
that all the noisy kerosine guzzlers avoid Schiphol all of a sudden. Noise
pollution and particulates from kerosine burning will still have their
influence on the mental and physical health of the Dutch population and safety
of airplanes will remain an issue for the future in such a densely populated
country.
Instead of trying to avoid the inevitable by ringing the
alarm bells and sending pressing letters to the news media, the aviation
industry could better think of a future with stable or even slightly declining numbers
of slots. Just because they can’t keep on growing forever!
