Man to soundproof home over night flight noise

Martin Hemmingway said the noise at night was "worse than expected"

A man living beneath an airport flightpath has said he is soundproofing his home due to being "woken during the night" by flights.

Martin Hemmingway lives in Otley near Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA), which was told this week it must limit the number of night flights it operates.

Mr Hemmingway said he was installing acoustic glass in his bedroom windows to reduce the noise from flights.

LBA said it was working with Leeds City Council, which enforces night flight rules, to "determine the best path forward".

Mr Hemmingway is a member of the Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA), which claimed the airport had breached its night flights limit in each of the past three years.

It is currently permitted 2,920 take-offs and landings between 23:00 and 07:00 during the summer, and 1,200 in the winter.

Airport bosses had wanted newer aircraft to be exempt from the cap, as well as smaller planes and flights which had been delayed.

A public inquiry took place in March and April to determine the legal meaning of the night-time flying rules, after which Leeds City Council issued a Breach of Condition Notice against LBA.

Campaigners welcomed the news that the airport's appeal had been dismissed

The airport then made three applications to the council to persuade it to reinterpret the meaning of the local night flight planning conditions, making a large number of its planes exempt from the rules.

However, the government's Planning Inspectorate rejected the appeal.

Mr Hemmingway, who moved to his property with his wife two years ago, said the planes "wake us during the night and then we get a clutch of flights around about 6 in the morning, if we haven't been woken before then".

"Usually there are flights through the night, around 2am as well."

He said the disruption was worse than they had expected.

"It can happen two or three times in the night, and sometimes you get back to sleep and sometimes you don't," he said.

He said the soundproofing measures would be installed next week.

"The windows are being replaced, the windows in the bedroom are going to be acoustic glass, which is much more expensive.

"It is a special glass that has a coating on it, that distorts the sound signal from the plane, so that you don't hear it through the window."

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