The claim that this is bad for the Dutch economy is nonsense. A huge number (probably most) Schiphol passengers are using the airport for a layover. They aren’t staying in the Netherlands, they’re not spending money there (at most some coffee or something but it’s duty free), and it doesn’t create many well paying jobs for people living in the Netherlands.
Most of the money Schiphol brings in stays in the pockets of people who are already rich and the jobs it creates are mostly poorly paid (like luggage handlers, staff at shops, etc). There’s plenty of open vacancies for jobs like that already, we don’t need an extremely loud and polluting industry for that.
Schiphol is too big as it is. The Netherlands is a small country and it doesn’t need such a huge airport. Why does Amsterdam need to be some hub for Europeans to fly across the world or to connect the Americas and Asia? Why must the Netherlands be even more polluted to make traveling slightly more convenient mostly for foreigners?
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.
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.
The claim that this is bad for the Dutch economy is nonsense. A huge number (probably most) Schiphol passengers are using the airport for a layover. They aren’t staying in the Netherlands, they’re not spending money there (at most some coffee or something but it’s duty free), and it doesn’t create many well paying jobs for people living in the Netherlands.
Most of the money Schiphol brings in stays in the pockets of people who are already rich and the jobs it creates are mostly poorly paid (like luggage handlers, staff at shops, etc). There’s plenty of open vacancies for jobs like that already, we don’t need an extremely loud and polluting industry for that.
Schiphol is too big as it is. The Netherlands is a small country and it doesn’t need such a huge airport. Why does Amsterdam need to be some hub for Europeans to fly across the world or to connect the Americas and Asia? Why must the Netherlands be even more polluted to make traveling slightly more convenient mostly for foreigners?
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.
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.