Is this the end of stack holding?

Can you confirm that this is the first time you have engaged with Heathrow communities on the use of tromboning for Heathrow arrivals ?

What are your plans to inform the Consultative Committee and Community Noise Forum ?

On what date did you implement the change / introduce revised procedures to use it ?

Yepp. This will work once you learn to eliminate two things: weather and human pilots.

Is this new London City point merge the reason that block times for flights from Dublin to LCY have recently increased so appallingly?

London City,all very well.When will we see this for Heathrow and Gatwick?

Would Linear Holds mean less aircraft noise?

Linear hold techniques would be great if they work, but common sense says they can only work if you amend the flight schedules to bring aircraft into UK airspace at the same rate that they will land. Any other scenario results in the same queuing we have now. Is this blog a kiteflyer to kid us that stacking can be magicced away? The only way to eliminate queuing is to provide more runway space, and that can be done at Northolt. When you move all the small aircraft out of Heathrow to Northolt you don’t need a 7 mile gap behind an A380. The slots released at Heathrow can be filled up with large aircraft carrying more passengers in the current number of flights. Link the Heathrow and Uxbridge branches of the Piccadilly line so that all trains run round the loop and Heath-holt becomes effectively a single airport with three runways.

So instead of having a holding structure that’s say 20nm x 10nm, you have one that covers several counties……..In some of the most congested airspace in Europe?

Dave Curtis, just thinking on here, if a ‘linear’ pattern works for reduction in noise for stacking alternative for arrivals, couldn’t a form of ‘linear spiral’ be used for aeroplanes to reach a desired height more quickly for departure as well?

I appear to to live under the newly reruted route 4. The are trafic has recently got notisably heavy depending on West or eastly wind. I live on the a 23 Salfords. If the planes turned left 1 mile furthe on when the wind is from the west this would put the planes over a more commercial area ie east Surrey hospital and refuse sites waterworks. Why fly the planes over our hoses. We already put up with Redhill Airodrome and helepads, constant ambulance noise and a 23 trafic. Why not move the flight path slightly north .please.

Presumably you could operate a linear stack at ~5000′ higher than the LCY stack for LHR, and simply have aircraft flying above the LCY traffic but on the same descent vector, achieving a huge benefit for LHR too?

How do you step from Westerlies to Easterlies on the fly though?

Hi

I have recently moved to Rotherhithe which has both LCY’s westerly departures/easterly approaches plus the Heathrow flights coming in from the north-eastern stack. Needless to say it is very noisy.

Looking at an average day it looks very much like “tromboning” has already been implemented as flights go west over north London from the stack and then they turn south-east before they join final approach to LHR.

After reading about linear point merge I hope/assume that this would mean that LHR flights will point merge somewhere out over the Thames Estuary and then fly in a straight line all the way to LHR.

Can you please provide some more details about the proposed Point Merge setup for LHR? Where will the merge point on the east side of London be i.e for westerly landings?

Also any indication on timelines for implementation would be very helpful.

Thanks

Please advise on when the new system for Heathrow will be implemented ? We live in Petts wood in Bromley and are subjected to a combination of easterlies every 1 min or the Biggin Stack all day long so there is never any peace. I never new this would exist so far from Heathrow but its extremely disturbing and starts very early some mornings and doesn’t stop until 11.30 pm

Hi there Dave,

Thanks for the post, the info graphic is very insightful as to how air traffic works above the Heathrow airspace.

I made the assumption that all of the stack control is done by the approach controller? In the Netherlands stacks are actually set just outside the terminal area so that aircraft can be streamed into the terminal area.

I am a student in the Netherlands who is learning about holding stacks and I am learning quickly that delaying an aircraft’s arrival is done very differently outside of Heathrow. Stacks seem to be generally avoided as much as possible.

I am wondering about how an approach air-traffic controller decides upon which aircraft to take from the bottom of a holding pattern. Do they choose based on estimated time of arrival at the airport or based on position in the holding pattern? I’m guessing a combination of both?

Thanks,
Liam