Southend-2

[Tagron]

I think that Red Four (post 4559) has put it well. My take on it is only slightly different.

The reason why the councils imposed a limit on the number of freight movements was I believe not about any aviation issue such as noise which was covered in other provisions of the S106.. It was about road traffic. Stobart of course was a major trucking operator and the Councils were concerned about the possibility of unlimited numbers of Stobart heavy trucks being introduced into the somewhat poor local road infrastructure.. The Councils could not directly control the number of trucks but they could do so indirectly by limiting the number of flights, hence the volume of cargo and the consequent trucking requirement. Stobart would have gone along with this because all their efforts were concentrated on developing SEN as a passenger airport. At the same it would have been extremely foolish commercially to give away.the right to operate cargo flights entirely. Why they came up with the formuila that they did makes little sense to me.

I am quite sure that both Stobarts and the Council would have dismissed the protestors predictions of road/rail/airport interchanges as impractical concepts that were not worth considering. In any case these were not part of any Planning Application so could not become the reason for the imposition of any planning conditions.

The problem with the S106 is that like all such agreements it ends up as a compromise and it is not unusual for such a compromise to fail to completely satisfy all parties. I have no doubt that those who drew up the agreement believed that they had reached a satisfactory conclusion. But the hard fact of the matter is that the document is defective in some areas because its authors simply did not know enough about practical aviation, and it shows in the failure of detail. It leads to the sort of debate that goes on endlessly in the make believe world of this thread . Whereas in the real aviation world the airport and airline operators find a way of complying with its requirements and get on with life.