Originally Posted by
KelvinD
Recently, I was a bit bored and I opened up Planefinder to see what was about my area (Basingstoke). There had been a break in the weather and on that day it was basically sunny with broken cloud.
I was amazed to see approximately 40 gliders, plus a couple of tugs, in the air both to the north and south of where I live, approx 5 miles north of Lasham. My first thought was "how will Flybe cope with that?" on their flights into Southampton as many of their arrivals pass my house between Basingstoke and Lasham. It also occurred to me that not only would this be "awkward" for Flybe, the RAF fly helicopters more or less along the line of the M3 motorway to and from Odiham, probably at around 1,000 ft and of course there is also Popham in the vicinity.
Lets get some actual facts into this debate instead of misinformation.
Flybe/Southampton Traffic? They're in controlled airspace from the TMA to the Solent CTA/CTR so they are irrelevant to this discussion as Gliders at Lasham do not fly in controlled airspace.
Odiham have comprehensive LOAs with Lasham and the working relationship is very good, Odiham use Online Glider Network for situational awareness and very rarely are Chinooks in similar areas to Gliders, their standard operating height in the Lasham area is 500-1000ft, well clear of any gliders unless the Chinooks are in the Lasham Circuit
Popham traffic has just as much right to be there as Lasham traffic, on fly in days the whole local area can be full of microlights, the opposite is true with Gliding Competitions.
Those are the facts, not that this has much relevance as the issue here is Farnborough not Lasham's relationships with other airfields (which by the way are generally in support of Lasham's cause)
Above all, you should never be suprised with the density of traffic from Lasham, I hear their figures are well in excess of 50,000 movements a year putting them in the top 20 of all airfields in the UK, unsuprisingly therefore they are very much a big player in the south's airspace infrastructure and won't go down quietly.