27 April 2021
A group of campaigners against a new grass airfield in Kent has issued a video likening the pilots involved to the Nazi leadership.
The outrageous and offensive video is on the YouTube channel of Chocks Go Away. It shows Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy discussing a battle plan with sub-titles about the farm strip.
Chocks Go Away has already poisoned local opinion with a campaign based on misinformation and lies.
The proposed farm strip is at Little Mongeham near Deal in Kent, on land owned by local farmer Richard Ledger. The airfield plan is being brought together by local pilots, including Nic Orchard and Steve Hoskins, who are among those displaced when Maypole Airfield closed last year.
Top: the farm strip plan as submitted to Dover District Council. Above: the fields where it will be located
The plan is to create an idyllic grass strip airfield with facilities for recharging electric aircraft and house up to 20 light aircraft. However, it has gone sour before the planning application has even been published.
On Monday, the team behind Little Mongeham Airfield, near Deal, Kent was told by Dover District Council that more information was required to validate the application and thus make it public.
So what is the plan?
Nic Orchard said, “The aim is to encourage people into the area, which is rich with history, flora and fauna, walking and cycling trails, [and] engage fully with the community with regard to youth organisations [and] charity support.”
20 comments
Rather than a noisy grass airfield with all those undesirable pilot chaps milling about perhaps the locals would prefer a lovely quiet light industrial estate with those incredibly quiet articulated lorries running 24 hours a day. Or perhaps 5000 new houses to fit snugly into the site. All they need to do is ask the residents of Ipswich how well they got on after campaigning to have the airfield closed 🙂
Nice one Tony, but these protesters are a long way up there own A….ses,
they are impossible to deal with,…. lets go for the 5000 social housing development !!
You may have a point there Sir…
A local MP’s Web Page might read…
“In Parliament, ******** is particularly interested in the economy, jobs, trade and ports and the UK’s border security. She is a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Ministry of Defence.
Before entering Parliament ******** was one of the country’s leading experts on housing and finance, helping to deliver real improvements to the construction industry in her role as the New Homes Quality Champion. A top nationally ranked housing and finance lawyer for nearly two decades, she also co-chaired an influential UK Government report, the Elphicke-House Report.
In 2015, ******** was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services to housing.”
Interesting…
Planning approval for new airstrips is practically impossible in these days of perceived environmental impact and resentful envy hidden behind a facade of virtue.
Reminds me of another airfield where residents did not the idea of a hard runway. So now they face it being turned into thousands of houses with a possible nice new motorway spur instead….unexpected consequences and all that.
You don’t mean Redhill by any chance??
not sure it follows that open farmland is a choice between a new airfield or a housing estate. Existing airfields have been affected and lost by conversion to housing, I guess under brownfield planning rules. But this one doesnt exist yet so perhaps not entirely surprising that locals arent keen on the noise.
I see the video has been removed, so hopefully that will stop some of the poisoning.
As someone who trained in Kent and is gettng his licence back after a break of 9 years, I love to see plans like this – good for flying, good for the local economy, a good use of land, etc., and noise abatement and management is relatively simple to do, and is already done at several other farm strips.
You can guarantee the people doing the complaining have never been in a small plane before.
Why not write to the same authorities they request their complainants to write too but in support of the proposal?
It may come down to a count of those in favour and those against in terms of comments. It can’t hurt, can it?
A bit small for a major housing development, but seems to satisfy all the criteria for a Traveller Site, for which there is woeful under-provision in Dover District. Perhaps a quiet, well-managed airstrip might not be so bad, after all!
I trust that your grasp of aviation technology is better than that you demonstrate in terms of the English language.
Whilst it is true that the majority of older, piston-engined GA aircraft, including the greater proportion of the elderly UK training fleet, require the use of 100LL (low lead) gasoline, modern light aircraft affordable by the average private owner tend to feature engines designed to utilise lead-free fuel. Whilst you may scoff (in other forums) at the idea of electric-powered light aircraft, could you have foreseen the rate of adoption of electric cars in this country?
As an experienced commercial pilot and flying instructor, based at a “proper airport” with a healthy mix of commercial and GA traffic (in my view, the optimum training environment for a private pilot), but who enjoys no recreational pursuit better than flying a simple aircraft from a rural airstrip, I cannot envisage an unlicensed, grass airstrip in rural Kent becoming such a hub of aviation activity as to cause significant disturbance to the lives of its neighbours.
When one considers the alternative diversification options for a farmer whose earlier, arguably even less intrusive, planning applications have been opposed by the local community, a well-managed airstrip with onsite glamping accommodation really doesn’t sound that bad, does it?
Take away the airstrip and you have a glamping facility which on its own is a useful addition to the community and economy locally, something farmers are doing all over the country. If the land is available for diversification then why not re-wild it, open a cafe and visitor centre, create facility for nature tourism, cycling, horse riding and bird/wildlife watching, this is one of the largest growth sectors in the rural tourism sector. Flyers are obviously passionate about flying so no doubt want an airfield but the idea that a farm must diversify and that an airfield is therefore the least worst option seems hard to justify. There are hundreds of homes near this proposed airfield and having spent a bit of time in and around airfields myself, no one is under any illusion that there won’t be a significant amount of noise, especially on summer weekends. when people are outside enjoying their gardens. Finding a site with a reasonable 1500m perimeter clear of residents and villages would seem to be likely to have attracted far less opposition.
I can’t imagine that Kent is much different to Yorkshire, where I live.
In urban areas you have tools in modified cars or quads racing around streets most evenings and at the weekend. Outside of towns you have motor bikers out on summer evenings and all weekends, racing up and down main roads causing a noise disturbance.
This noise is also largely linked to aggressive, i.e. illegal driving and frequently illegal modifications. Where’s the outcry and call for action by authorities?
I can sit at my airfield watching a Rotax-powered aircraft start its take-off run, and hear nothing until it passes by. Meanwhile, I can hear motorbikes a mile away for a minute or more.
Which is worse?
Sit in your garden in suburbia. How long do you have to go before someone starts a chainsaw, strimmer, lawn mower, puts music on in their garden, has music booming in their car as they drive down the street?
So, I can’t say that I enjoy any real peace where I live. There’s barely more than a minute’s respite.
Noise is noise. The source is irrelevant.
Presumably, maintaining viable aviation infrastructure will benefit almost everyone. Shrivel it up to a certain point, and it’ll just wither and die. There has to be grassroots facilities. It’s like expecting football to continue if you scrap all playing and training, except for the top 2 divisions.
Are compromises possible? Maybe, new aviation developments could happen with some caveats, such as only allowing permissible types to be hosted, i.e. those with limited noise footprints.
Its not surprising the lady objecting and her partner own a wedding venue just to the south of the proposed final approach from the south. They are just looking after their own commercial interest under the cloak of rallying locals against the proposal for environmental reasons !
Gosh what a lot of codswallop I am reading!
If you knew the area you would realise that the roads are far too narrow for articulated vehicles to come and go from an industrial unit. Likewise there is no infrastructure to support 5000 social housing dwellings.
“You can guarantee the people doing the complaining have never been in a small plane before”. My husband has a PPL and all our household have been involved in aviation of one sort or another for many years.
We don’t have any urban noise as we live, by choice in a very rural area, to mask the sound of the aircraft flying low above us.
I am intrigued as to how it will help our local economy as there is nothing in the immediate vicinity to help? Perhaps you could enlighten me.