As a business pitch to the local community Biggin Hill's master plan makes interesting reading.

It goes to some length to allay any fears about increased noise and nuisance and offers to reduce the total number of landing and take-off slots. Of course, in return, the airport would need to have longer operating hours on weekdays and at weekends.

And this is where you have to start reading between the lines.

As any tour operator or airline will tell you there is huge demand for travel at weekends with take-off and landing slots fiercely fought over at all the major airports. And it's not difficult to understand why.

If you take that alluring long weekend in Paris mentioned in the document you will want to land back in the UK as late as possible on Sunday evening in order to maximise your time away. Similarly many private jets, especially during the summer, head off to the south of France and other parts of the Mediterranean on a Friday evening or early Saturday morning returning on Sunday evening.

So the airport is not being quite as magnanimous as it would wish to appear in offering to ditch some of their non-utilised weekday slots in exchange for a slightly smaller number of highly sought after early morning and late evening take-offs.

Their document says that those within the noise zone will be subject to 57 decibels which is said to be the level of a normal conversation. If this is the same as someone talking it must mean that your conversations will be interrupted every time a plane lands or takes off.

So it might be best not to plan for any deep and meaningful discussions for early mornings or weekday evenings. You can forget those peaceful lie-ins on a Sunday morning and your best bet for those balmy Sunday evenings in the summer will be to shut the windows and turn up the TV to drown out all those unwanted conversations.

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