On the 7th May a planning application was lodged with Dover District Council for an airfield to be built on farmland in our village, Little Mongeham in Kent, where a possible 20 light aircraft and a helipad, mostly syndicated out to numerous people with flying licences, will be based, along with two hangars (2,250 sqM) a 750m runway, glamping pods and workshops. We are in a climate emergency. Such pollution from recreational flying is environmentally harmful and inherently unsustainable.
Lead pollution from recreational flying
This proposal will have a considerably detrimental impact on the environment due to lead emissions dispersed from the aircraft’s piston engines (no amount of lead is tolerated or acceptable to the human body). There will be in excess of 7000+ movements a year from mostly old noisy planes running on toxic fossil fuels which will be freely dispersed on all below.
Noise pollution from recreational flying
To counter objections from residents about noise pollution, the proposers disingenuously state there will be electric aircraft. This is ‘greenwashing’: there are only three electric aircraft on the UK register currently, the reason being they are prohibitively expensive and with capacity only for very short flights.
Campaign Groups set up to join
A group of local residents have got together and started a campaign called ‘Chocksgoaway’ to fight this application. It has already gained momentum in garnering objections from those who live nearby. However, the developers have placed an article in a couple of international aviation publications/magazines, calling for their readers to help them by writing letters of support and providing the link to the planning department to do so, some as far away as California, Boston and Germany!
This has resulted in ‘skewed’ and inauthentic numbers of supporters, the majority of whom do not live in the area or Kent or for that matter in the UK!
Please everyone help us protect our ever increasingly diminishing green spaces and stop these developers riding roughshod over our countryside. They’ve called us country bumpkins but we’ll show them by putting up a good fight!
Visit www.chocksgoaway.com to object by 7th June on our behalf wherever you live to help stop this development.
