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daa refuses to consider flight path solution

Ashbourne: 20/May/2024

After a six month delay, daa CEO Kenny Jacobs has written to the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications. In his letter he informed the committee that the daa will not consider a proposal from the North Runway Technical Group (NRTG) to fix the flight paths that have caused over 175,000 breaches of planning and environmental law since the new runway opened.

The flight paths in use from Dublin’s north runway unnecessarily overfly 30,000 people outside the zone defined in daa’s own Environmental Impact Statement. This has caused multiple complaints to Fingal Co Co , Meath Co Co and An Board Pleanála as well as to daa itself and continues to hurt daa’s ability to get planning permission to raise the 32M passenger cap.

The group is now calling for Transport Minister Eamon Ryan to appoint directors to the daa board with relevant qualifications and experience in each of infrastructure development, engineering/environment and aviation and to make them individually responsible for the company’s performance in those areas.

According to daa’s website no member of senior management, the executive team, or the board has any qualification or technical experience in aviation, engineering, or infrastructure development. At a meeting with NRTG members, daa executives claimed that despite being the state airport’s owner and operator, daa has for decades “devolved responsibility” to IAA and now to AirNav for the operation of the aerodrome and development of aviation infrastructure.

  • Daa says they are dependant on AirNav’s review of the group’s proposal which they say reaffirmed that fixing the AirNav-designed flight paths is “complex”.
  • AirNav had previously voiced a single objection to the proposal, that a climb-gradient of more than 2.5% used in NRTG’s proposal would never be approved by regulators. This despite AirNav already using an approved 6.6% at daa-managed Cork Airport.
  • Daa has used the group’s proposal for six months to delay answering questions and concerns about flight paths from the Oireachtas Transport Committee, constituency TDs, County Councillors and others, insisting they had to wait for AirNav.

NRTG member, pilot and civil engineer Gareth O’Brien said “We believe daa has for years been too focused on running the shopping centre in the terminals and has neglected everything else. We are deeply concerned that the future of the airport we depend on will continue to be at risk until the board and executives take seriously daa’s role as the developer and operator of the whole airport.”

At a meeting with Kenny Jacobs in October 2023, O’Brien asked the CEO, “Knowing you will need the 32 million passenger cap raised, why would you choose to create 30,000 opponents out of people you don’t need to overfly?” That question remains unanswered.

NRTG believes that Dublin Airport as a key national asset and Ireland’s transport connection to the world, is critical to Foreign Direct Investment, tourism, and the Irish economy in general. The group has become deeply concerned that the biggest risk to the future of Dublin Airport is the ongoing failure of daa to take seriously its responsibility for aviation and infrastructure development.

The North Runway Technical Group is a group of pilots, commercial and private, along with engineers and others with various technical qualifications. Members of the group depend on Dublin Airport for their livelihood. The group formed to examine the non-compliant flight paths used by daa for the north runway and propose a solution that would reduce the harm to the people affected and help secure the future development of the airport.

Multiple articles and more detailed explanation of the groups proposal are available at:

https://www.dublin-north-runway.com/runway-info/

Supplementary information specific to this release:

https://www.dublin-north-runway.com/runway-info/daa-rejects-solution/

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