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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, the same thing also happens around small airports, and there the NIMBYs-come-lately often prevail.

https://www.bjtonline.com/business-jet-news/runway-removal-t...

The opposite also happens: the approach to London Heathrow gives wonderful views over London, but at least a million people suffer from more-or-less constant aircraft noise and pollution, except for a few hours overnight.

Further expansion was approved in 2018, when one of the local MPs — Boris Johnson, who had promised to "lie down in front of bulldozers" to prevent expansion — was conveniently on a trip abroad during the vote it Parliament.

(The areas of London overflown are a mix of wealthy, average and poor-ish, left-voting and right-voting, it's far too large an area to wave away as X group of people complaining.)

In Bay Area, every time approaches to our three busy airports are changed there is a lot of bellyaching, mostly from rich areas like Saratoga and Woodside. Usually summarized by "Why don't you fly over those places were poor people live?"

Made worse because well off areas tend to be in the hills, and so planes are lower over the ground.

Much of the recent complaining is due to concentration of near-ground routes as a side-effect of the NextGen routing system.

http://soseastbay.org/jet-noise-in-a-nutshell-nexgen/

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/faqs/

The sad part is NextGen was supposed to allow planes to approach at higher altitudes and descend with engines idled to reduce noise.

The Government won that vote with a majority of nearly 300. Johnson’s absence didn’t make the slightest difference to the outcome.

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