Aircraft Stacking

[kwicky]

Due to the huge increase in air travel in the UK it is intended to bring extra stacking areas to cope meaning that many more people will be disturbed by noise. All this is overland and mostly affects the busy South East airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted.
Why can't stacking be done over the North Sea and then when able to land filter the planes to the respective airports?

[missmoore]

What is stacking?

[GeordiePengy]

Stacking is basically when you have more than one aircraft flying in a spiral downwards towards the airport, at an equal distance apart. Therefore they land on the runway at regular intervals, i.e., every 30 seconds.

I'm sure some aviation expert will give a better/more informative answer...!

As for why they can't do it over the North Sea, well I'm only guessing that it'll have something to do with the plane being visible to the control tower/airport, especially in poor visability. Again, some aviation brains might know the answer to this one. I'm curious myself......

[kwicky]

It must be more than visibility from the airport control tower as some of the proposed stacking areas are as far apart as Suffolk and in excess of 50 miles. To be blighted by continual noise is obviously not a factor in the planners calculations.

[GeordiePengy]

kwicky, you are probably right about the visibility thing. I'm no expert like I said, so I bow to any superior knowledge out there.

Obviously little consideration has been given to the good folk living under the flight paths to the airports. If they did stack the planes over somewhere like the North Sea, surely there would be one flight path from each of these stacks to each airport, i.e., Heathrow, Gatwick, Standsted, and Luton. Surely these four flight paths would be constantly in use so anyone living underneath one would have a plane flying over their house say every 30 seconds...? Wouldn't that be worse than it is now?