The great night flight fight

Nicky lives in Burley Park, just near the main flight path for Leeds Bradford Airport. The morning rush can be like “a motorway in the sky for about half an hour,” she says. Just the thought of LBA's ongoing proposal is a significant source of stress, she says, adding: “I try not to think about it a lot of the time … It just makes you feel like your whole world is being downgraded.”

Nicky is a supporter of Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport (GALBA). They’ve been at loggerheads with the airport for years, but now they’re gearing up for what they see as the next big fight: over how many night flights the airport is allowed to run. A planning application from the airport has gone in, which, depending on your take, could mean hundreds of extra night flights are about to make life a living hell for those in the flight path; or that a new generation of low-emission, low-noise planes is being enticed to the airport to merely purr their way over homes kindly soundproofed at LBA’s expense. 

We chatted to the campaigners and to the airport’s Chief Executive to try to work out: who is right?

Hi! This is Mia, one of the Exchange’s two staff writers. I’ve spent the last few days reading planning documents, talking to experts and campaigners alike, trying to get beyond tit-for-tat PR statements and wrap my head around the airport debate. It’s the kind of work local news is rarely able to invest in without support. So to access all of this article — and to be part of the renewal of local news in West Yorkshire — join us as a paid member.

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The round up

🏗️ Leeds is losing UKREiiF in 2028, the massive real estate jamboree organisers announced today. “This isn’t a story about leaving Leeds,” said managing director Nathan Spencer, inaccurately. “It’s a story about celebrating everything that Leeds and West Yorkshire has helped UKREiiF become.” Fine, sod off over to Liverpool, and take your Canada Goose-clad executives and massive dilapidated green pontoon with you, we say. It’s another blow to Leeds Dock, whose buzzy rebirth and slow decline was chronicled by Brad last month. On the plus side, architects MawsonKerr are opening a studio there, and … well, we’ll get one last hoorah with UKREiiF in 2027. 

📱Kirklees Reform Party defended a post alleged to be by one of its councillors which described immigrants as “third-world animals,” the Local Democracy Reporting Service’s Lyra Auld reports. The post was made on what appears to be the personal Facebook account of Colne Valley councillor Tracy Clayton as she holidayed in Greece, where she appears to have delighted in the lack of “invaders”. “It is an invasion just like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson said,” the post added, speaking of her home country. Contacted for comment by Auld, a Kirklees Reform spokesperson — the best contact while Clayton is away — asked “what’s wrong with it?” A spokesperson later said that Clayton is “completely correct.”

🪧A one-woman protest against Tui continues outside its Leeds branch weeks after her complaint, the T&A reports. Mrs Judith Weelands — who is pictured by the paper holding a sign saying “do not book a holiday” — says her £2,872 holiday to a Cape Verde resort had cleanliness and safety issues. Tui told the paper that they had offered compensation and the matter had been reviewed by ABTA, the body that reviews complaints in the travel industry, but Mrs Weelands considers it insufficient. Mia, an inveterate fan of byzantine consumer battles, salutes her.

The great night flight fight

By Mia Jankowicz

It was the tail end of 2022, and Vincent Hodder, the CEO of Leeds Bradford Airport, had a problem. Campaigners at the Group for Action on Leeds Bradford Airport, or GALBA, had complained that the airport had been running hundreds more flights at night than it was allowed, for years on end. 

“I went back to my team and said, ‘can you check the numbers for me?’” Hodder tells The Exchange, in his soft antipodean accent. Having checked with his team, he sent a swift denial to Leeds city council. 

“And I was completely wrong,” he says. “We had breached. GALBA were correct.”

The reported night flight numbers had been wrong since 2014, long before Hodder arrived in 2021. Rule changes and new aircraft noise classifications had muddied the picture, he argues. Back then, “nobody was paying any attention,” he claims. “The council wasn't paying attention. The airport wasn't paying attention. And that was the reality.”

How did he react when he found out? “It was like, ‘ah, shit,’” he says. “‘Shouldn’t somebody have figured that out?’”

Four years later, and GALBA and LBA are still feuding over night flights. Now, amid a projection of seven million passengers by 2030, LBA wants to change the logic around how its night flights are capped, focusing less on flight numbers and more on decibels of noise produced. But, campaigners say, the replacement system is no better — in fact, they claim it could herald a new boom in night flights. So who’s right?