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Old 2nd Sep 2014, 14:11
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joy ride
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
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Lydd and Manston may not be ideal but could take some pressure off Gatwick and Heathrow.

I remember that airliner having to ditch in NY's Hudson River due to double bird strike .....of course, that could NEVER happen in one of Europe's largest sea bird breeding grounds! I wonder what Captain Sullenberger would think of the Thames/Medway junction as an airport site.

Luckily the Hudson ditching had no serious casualties, a ditching at Grain, where the tides of the Thames and the Medway clash together could be a very different matter; is not a clever place to build anything, let alone an airport. Many ferry and boat accidents have occurred in those waters and the death toll was high due to tides, fog and cold water. The sunken WW2 explosives ship USS Richard Montgomery is another potentially lethal hazard to consider if any sort of traffic increases there.

Boris's "Vanity Projects" are becoming quite numerous, anything that seems to him to be a good or grand scheme rapidly seems to get the "Boris" pre-fix!

Sadly, despite being a life-long fan of aviation, I think at some point a densely packed area like south eastern England, at a time of dwindling global resources, has to put a cap on airliner ops, and we are already near that point.
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