Heathrow Airport Sample Clauses

Heathrow Airport. Heathrow has long been the number one airport in Europe. As such, it is not sur- prising that noise annoyance has been a notorious problem in the area. Heathrow is a ‘designated airport’, which means that the central government, more specifi- cally the Department for Transport (DfT), is responsible for the environmental policy around the airport. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is involved in advising the government. In addition, many other actors are involved in the national policy-making process in an open network in which all participants are in a position to advance their interests and influence the policy outcome. These include the sector with the British Airport Authority (BAA) and Air Traffic Service (ATS), local governments, and NGOs such as the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF) and the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Downloaded by [Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen] at 02:38 19 November 2013 Noise (HACAN). This constellation is in line with the liberal-pluralist character of the British political system in general (xxx Xxxxxxx, 1995a; Watcher, 2007). All these actors, moreover, also participate in their respective international networks. In 1959, Heathrow first introduced the goal of limiting noise annoyance. It was defined as reducing the noise made during individual departure and arrival flights separately. The noise made by the planes was measured by noise monitors and expressed with the help of a noise index, the so-called Noise and Number Index (NNI). Some experts argued that for technical reasons it might be better to adopt the more common index for noise as a unit. Nevertheless, it was decided at the time to stick to the NNI, not because it was perceived to be ‘better’, but because a change in the index was believed to create public distrust in the scientific basis and the methods for noise abatement (Bijsterveld, 2006). While scientists and policy-makers understood each other quite well, society dominated on this matter, which reminds one of the engineering type of knowl- edge use. During the 1980s, the type of knowledge use temporarily shifted to a more technocratic type. Two clear expressions of this shift are presented. First, the unit for expressing noise exposure changed. In 1988, the DfT eventually decided to change it from NNI to the more common index of aircraft noise. This time, con- tract experts and experts of the CAA had been involved in international networks where they had learnt that dB(A) was widely reco...