In my experience airfields take a lot of measures to try and keep noise levels to a minimum. Nottingham airport (EGBN not NX) have 2 circuits where we ask pilots to cut their downwind and not overfly the neighbouring estate of West Bridgeford. We have noise tolerance levels for aircraft; take the boeing stearman for instance, it's very noisy due to the propellers length and the tips going supersonic and so we will allow one stearman in a day to take off and land. Every other aircraft that visits our airfield is a small single or twin prop.
Leicester, Gamston and other random airfields i've visited have included on their websites, and I believe pooleys as well, instructions for joining and landing on certain runways to avoid noise and low flying above houses.
Airfields have better things to be doing than answering complaints from local people and work towards getting noise levels as low as possible, do you think they enjoy been hassled?
It is not uncommon to receive complaints from the people that live in Tollerton (nearby village) because of the aircraft flying over head. Most of the people that do the complaining live on the otherside of the village and hear the aircraft for perhaps 10 seconds whilst it passes over head, certainly not below 500feet. This shows that a fair few people complain just because aviation is there and it's easy to attack. It is mostly why pilots start getting defensive and abusive everytime someone posts a complaint to the newspapers because from what we know of general complainers - they moved to their residency after the airfield was built (certainly the case with Nottingham as it's been there for around 100years) - they live far enough away that the aircraft only bothers for a few second and are generally quiter than traffic outside! - or the fact that these people just complain about everything they can.
Quite often I hear of another airfield under threat of closure due to councils, locals wanting rid of the airfields etc, it is rather saddening. Nottingham's future currently isn't secure, i'm not sure where Leicester stands but I don't think that airfield is in a good position. The fact is most of these complaints are usually worded in such a way as to suggest we purposely make a nuisance of ourselves, as if we want to spoil your peace and quiet. If aviation is out of the limelight then airfields can be saved and those that use aviation for recreational purposes can enjoy their hobbie hassle free so it makes sense that we are actually trying to keep out of the way.
I've seen pollution mentioned here, which is another big thing that anti-aviation activists protest about. If they'd actually done their homework aviation is quite a small contributer to greenhouses compared to most things in this world, yet airliners and aircraft manufacturers are always looking at new ways of reducing pollution load... easyJet for instance are trying to develope what they call the ecoJet which is rumoured (keyword) to produce around 35mg's of CO2 per passenger per mile; much better than a car. Their current fleet produces around 96mg's of CO2 per passenger per mile at the minute which is still better than your average car. I've seen on a few websites that aviation contributes to about 5% of the global CO2 emissions... this is lower than IT, which i've also seen on a few sites to be around 6-7%.. should people stop using computers?
From reading this I hope anyone that has had REAL bad experiences with aviation, aircraft flying low, noise levels etc that has made complaints and received insults from pilots can understand why we are very defensive and quick to throw something back. Others might just find this a bore and might pounce on something i've said but nevermind
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