Aircraft Noise: Annoyance, House Prices and Valuation

“Nobody wants to buy your house. It’s the aircraft noise. You’ll have to reduce the price a lot.” Aircraft noise around airports causes annoyance, and tends to reduce the price of affected properties. Can annoyance be ‘costed’ by examining house price reductions? Are there other ways of valuing annoyance in monetary terms? This short paper summarises key research results and poses some questions

Air Traffic Control Safety Indicators: What is Achievable?

European Air Traffic Control is extremely safe. The drawback to this safety record is that it is very difficult to estimate what the ‘underlying’ accident rate for mid-air collisions is now, or to detect any changes over time. The aim is to see if it possible to construct simple ATC safety indicators that correlate with this underlying accident rate. A perfect indicator would be simple to comprehend and capable of being calculated by a checklist process. An important concept is that of ‘system control’: the ability to determine the outcome against reasonably foreseen changes and variations of system parameters. A promising indicator is ‘Incident Not Resolved by ATC’, INRA, incidents in which the ground ATC defences have been ‘used up’. The key question is: if someone says he or she knows how to make a good estimate of the underlying accident rate, then how could this claim be tested? If it correlates very well with INRA, then what would be the argument for saying that it is a better indicator

Air Traffic Management Safety Challenges

The primary goal of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system is to control accident risk. ATM safety has improved over the decades for many reasons, from better equipment to additional safety defences. But ATM safety targets, improving on current performance, are now extremely demanding. Safety analysts and aviation decision-makers have to make safety assessments based on statistically incomplete evidence. If future risks cannot be estimated with precision, then how is safety to be assured with traffic growth and operational/technical changes? What are the design implications for the USA’s ‘Next Generation Air Transportation System’ (NextGen) and Europe’s Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR)? ATM accident precursors arise from (eg) pilot/controller workload, miscommunication, and lack of upto- date information. Can these accident precursors confidently be ‘designed out’ by (eg) better system knowledge across ATM participants, automatic safety checks, and machine rather than voice communication? Future potentially hazardous situations could be as ‘messy’ in system terms as the Überlingen mid-air collision. Are ATM safety regulation policies fit for purpose: is it more and more difficult to innovate, to introduce new technologies and novel operational concepts? Must regulators be more active, eg more inspections and monitoring of real operational and organisational practices

Controller workload, airspace capacity and future systems.

In air traffic control (ATC), controller workload – or controller mental workload – is an extremely important topic. There have been many research studies, reports and reviews on workload (as it will be referred to here). Indeed, the joke is that researchers will produce ‘reviews of reviews’ (Stein, 1998). The present document necessarily has something of that flavour, and does review many of the ‘breakthrough’ research results, but there is a concentration on some specific questions about workload

Neo lines: Alan Hollinghurst and the apogee of the eighties

When Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in October 2004, it sealed the arrival in fiction of a retrospective exploration of the 1980s which had already been unmistakable in British culture. While the political continuities from Margaret Thatcher’s social revolution have been a central topic in the analysis of Tony Blair’s administrations, the return of the 1980s in popular culture has also been evident for years. Literature has not been insulated from this climate. Since the turn of the millennium Nicola Barker’s Five Miles From Outer Hope (2001), Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane (2002) and David Peace’s GB84 (2004) have been prominent examples of the ‘neo-1980s’ novel in Britain. It is on Hollinghurst’s book, however, that this essay will focus. To whose 1980s does The Line of Beauty return us? What is at stake

The middle years of Martin Amis

This essay was commissioned by Rod Mengham and Philip Tew for their volume British Fiction Today (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). Essays for this volume were specifically requested to focus on writers’ work since 1990. Thus the essay does not pretend to be a detailed account of Amis’s entire career, only to describe, contextualize and assess one stretch of it. The essay was written in summer 2005; hence the last major Amis work referred to here is Yellow Dog (2003). The system of referencing also reflects the specifications given the editors. British Fiction Today appeared in autumn 2006. In that printed version of the essay, the editors have made certain alterations. The version here, for what it’s worth, is all my own work

Airport safety, capacity and investment

Paper presented at SurTech 2002, The Aviation Surveillance Technologies ConferenceThe title ‘Airport Safety, Capacity and Investment’ could potentially cover an enormous range of topics and approaches. Techniques used include probabilistic risk analysis, queueing theory, operational research, and cost benefit analysis (CBA). The aim here is both to give an impression of the whole subject and to focus on a few key topics. Surveillance technology plays an important part in delivering safety and capacity, but has to be seen in the larger system picture, particularly when investment is contemplated

Estopped by Grand Playsaunce: Flann O'Brien's Post-colonial Lore

This article seeks to extend our understanding of the Irish writer Flann O'Brien (Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan) by reading him from a Law and Literature perspective. I suggest that O'Nolan's painstaking and picky mind, with its attention to linguistic nuance, was logically drawn to the languages of law. In this he confirmed the character that he showed as a civil servant of the cautious, book-keeping Irish Free State. The Free State, like other post-colonial entities, was marked at once by a rhetoric of rupture from the colonial dispensation and by a degree of legal and political continuity. I suggest that O'Nolan's writing works away at both these aspects of the state, alternating between critical and utopian perspectives. After establishing an initial context, I undertake a close reading of O'Nolan's parodies of actual legal procedure, focusing on questions of language and censorship. I then consider his critical work on the issue of Irish sovereignty, placing this in its post-colonial historical context. Finally I describe O'Nolan's treatment of Eamon de Valera's 1937 Constitution. I propose that his attention to textual detail prefigures in comic form the substantial rereadings of the Constitution that have been made in the last half-century