• tal@lemmy.today
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    8 months ago

    Over the summer, Belgium’s Mobility Minister Georges Gilkinet proposed a ban on flights between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., saying “everyone has the right to rest and quiet nights."

    I used to live directly under an airport approach path.

    I did not care about aircraft at night. I’m not going to say that there isn’t anyone else out there that does, but you adapt to normal sounds in your environment. Airplanes didn’t wake me up. I’m asleep. If there’s one time I want a given aircraft coming through, it’s when I’m asleep.

    What I did find obnoxious was aircraft coming in during the day and – for a few seconds – drowning out whatever was going on. Today, TiVO and streaming media with pausing and all that exists, and helps mitigate that to some degree, but at the time, if you missed a critical bit of television dialog, you missed it. And while most of the time we’d just suspend a conversation for a few seconds, and it became automatic, every now and then something would happen that didn’t deal well with interruption, and it would happen just when an aircraft was landing.

    If they aren’t flying airplanes in during the night, that presumably means that there’s gonna be more demand for airport capacity during the day.