Major national and international news items are shown here. The latest items are at the top and an archive is maintained. Many of these items are also put into the ‘A-Z’. For more news, snippets and local items, see the Airport Watch web site.
Jan 18 2017
Gatwick Airport announced today its participation in a global renewable electricity alliance designed to generate increased demand for renewable electricity, alongside plans to become ‘carbon neutral’ by the spring. Gatwick will be the first UK airport to join the RE100 …
Jan 13 2017
The Government has published its proposals for changes to the night flights regime for Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, the only three airports in the UK at which the Government imposes noise controls. The Government sets caps on the number of aircraft …
Dec 2 2016
The aviation industry has today launched a campaign calling for Government to commit to airspace modernisation to facilitate a huge increase in the number of flights in UK airspace. The coalition of airports, airlines and air navigation providers, led by …
Nov 25 2016
The Chair of the Committee on Climate Change, Lord Deben, this week challenged the Government to come up with an answer on aviation emissions if it wants to go ahead with Heathrow expansion. Deben set out the Committee’s concerns in …
Nov 21 2016
The aviation sector remains very lightly taxed. Exempt from both fuel duty and VAT, Air Passenger Duty was introduced as a way of ensuring that the sector makes some contribution to the public purse. APD has never been high enough …
Nov 2 2016
The Government has failed to take adequate measures to meet the legal requirement to being levels of nitrogen dioxide to within legal limits as soon as possible, the High Court ruled today, and has fixed its estimates for compliance dates …
Oct 25 2016
With the Government now having officially announced its support for a new runway at Heathrow, despite having slashed the Airports Commission’s claim of a £147 billion benefit to the UK by almost 60% (referring instead to a benefit over sixty …
Oct 25 2016
PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The environmental NGO, Aviation Environment Federation [1], which represents communities around the UK’s airports, has strongly criticised the Government’s decision to back a third runway at Heathrow. Cait Hewitt, AEF Deputy Director, said: This is …
Oct 24 2016
The Government is widely expected to announce this week that it supports a new runway at Heathrow. Yet in the protracted media and political discussions building up to this decision, the silence about the climate change impact of expansion has been …
Oct 13 2016
A new report from the Committee on Climate Change, published today, on how to deliver the ambitious climate targets agreed in Paris in 2015 identifies aviation as a ‘hard to treat’ sector and continues to caution against unlimited passenger growth. …