LYDD, THE UNLIKELIEST AIRPORT

[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2007. This article may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the publisher]

Lydd is a minnow airport that is planning a breathtaking 9,900% expansion. It can only be at the cost of safety, say the critics. CEDRIC PULFORD reports

LYDD in Kent is a case study of the effect of aviation expansion on the land environment. On the face of it, an airport next to a nuclear power station, unspoilt marshland and a nature reserve of international importance, with an identifiable safety hazard of birds fouling aero engines and a location half a hundred miles from its main market, is not best placed to expand.

None of this deterred the Department for Transport in its Air Transport White Paper from seeing development possibilities at Lydd, and the airport owners from picking up that baton and running with it. The modest flying field with an all-but-invisible 3,000 passengers per annum wants to expand to 300,000 ppa by 2009 and ultimately to two million ppa. A runway extension to accommodate largish jets like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, and a terminal with a capacity for 500,000 ppa, are planned.

Lydd, which is on the coast, was built in 1954 for cross-channel car ferry services. It enjoyed strong levels of traffic in the Fifties and Sixties, but competition from roll-on roll-off sea ferries saw it decline in the early Seventies. Long before Ryanair and EasyJet, budget travellers could fly from Lydd to Le Touquet, as they still can – destinations equally inconvenient for their respective national capitals, but at least the flights were cheap.

The airport’s stated reasons for expansion are: a viable solution to increasing UK demand for air transport; providing a local airport for business and domestic flights; providing local jobs for local people; regeneration of Romney Marsh and a boost for tourism in Kent and East Sussex. The aims may be valid from the aviation industry’s perspective; what is in question is the ability of Lydd to meet them. One in four jobs in Romney Marsh is based on tourists, particularly bird-watchers. It is hard to see that jobs can be maintained, much less increased, if the tourism environment is degraded, if birds and driven away and tranquillity ruined by overflying jets.  

In the cosseted aviation industry, which is not subject to normal commercial rigours, no-one says a facility has outlived its purpose, let’s close it. A new use must be found. Lydd has reinvented itself as Lydd-London Ashford Airport (although London is 53 miles away).

That’s 53 miles and no railway. The nearest rail station is Appledore, 7 ½ miles away. That would leave 70% of passengers getting to and from the enlarged airport by car by country roads, according to consultants retained by airport opponents. The consultants projected that just 10% of passengers would use the bus and another 20% taxis.

Infrastructure demands would soon follow if the airport expansion goes as planned, with upgraded roads, perhaps a motorway, and a railway link. This amid the isolation of Romney Marsh, described by Louise Barton of the opposition Lydd Airport Action Group as “one of the last remaining tranquil areas of the South-east”.

Lydd is less than three miles from the Dungeness nuclear power complex, raising fears of an air accident or a terror strike. It is also on top of a major reserve operated by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Dungeness conservation area - more than 7,400 acres including what is described as the most diverse and extensive examples of vegetated shingle in Europe, with special forms of broom and blackthorn, together with a large population of great crested newts.

The airport’s managing director, Zaher Deir, insisted that there were no safety concerns. “We have a fully upgraded and licensed air traffic control system and we are confident there is no danger posed by our proximity to the plant or the military firing ranges [at Lydd and Hythe],” he told the Daily Telegraph.

“There are nuclear facilities all over the UK close to aircraft movements. If there is a danger it exists everywhere, not just at Lydd.”

He has a point there.

As for birdstrikes posing a danger to aircraft in flight, Deir added: “We have a bird management scheme and we have efficient methods of keeping birds and the aircraft apart.”

That sounds like getting rid of the birds. Kent Wildlife Trust said control measures at the expanded airport might include degrading the birds’ habitat over a radius of up to 10 miles. This would take in almost all of the Dungeness to Pett Level Special Protection Area and all of the RSPB’s Dungeness nature reserve. The internationally important Dungeness to Pett Level Special Protection Area has important populations of breeding terns and gulls. In winter it is home to large populations of Bewick’s swans and shoveler ducks.

The wildlife trust said the added pollution of aircraft taking off and landing at Lydd, and of cars bringing passengers to the airport, would further damage the shingle habitats at Dungeness and the site’s rare insects. Existing air pollution is thought to be already affecting the area’s important vegetation.

It is hard to think of an airport less suitable for expansion than Lydd from a land use perspective. In human terms, London City is probably the worst because of the density of population surrounding it. That is another airport that started small and, inevitably, wants to grow. A case surely of neither, nor. But the Lydd airport protesters have a job of work ahead.

Cedric Pulford is the author of Air Madness: Runways and the Blighting of Britain, published by Ituri