Gonzo
to be fair to the teams from LHR and NATs they ahd to deal witha lot of riduclous questions
Example-since the changes I am kept awake all night by aircraft noise -and of course LHR is closed at night essentially and one question often merged into another.
However the issue was that they claimed that people in the Bagshot area should not be too concerned as almost all aircraft would be at 6000 ft or higher. That of course isn't true -quite lot can make it up that high but even from my own observations many don't for all kinds of reasons. It wasnt so much they they were wrong- in fact rephrasing it a bit to say we aim to get planes up that high but probably exasperated by some of the sillier preceding questions, they got dogmatic on the wrong point and lost a lot of credibility over it.
Moving on to Mr Nimmer s comments I think I made it quite clear that most people in the area i live and that was affected by these trials are not in the least anti LHR -a great many of them work there and a lot of people see it as great convenience. In my own case I grew up next to LHR when it still had 5 runways so for me its always 'been there'. It is purely the point that people in todays world expect a degree of proper consultation about changes and not to be consulted as an afterthought which is what happened here. There was no consultation until after people complained in droves about changes in noise patterns. I cannot speak for those east of LHR but I suspect your argument holds much greater force but out to the south west i have never ever heard anyone complain about aircraft noise per se about LHR , EGLF is a different story, although I am sure there are complaints and enquires about odd incidents which usually have perfectly reasonable explanations which people accept.