Event: UECNA (Union) launch of a report on night flights, commissioned from the Aviation Environment Federation (AEF) Chair: John Stewart
- John Stewart — Chair, UECNA
- Bertie Lloyd — Aviation Environment Federation (AEF), author of the report
- Mira Kapfinger — Stay Grounded Network
[0:03] John Stewart: Hello and welcome, everybody. My name is John Stewart, I’m the chair of UECNA. UECNA today is launching a major report on night flights. We commissioned the Aviation Environment Federation to research and write it, and the main speaker is the author of the report, Bertie Lloyd. We’ll also be hearing from Klaas, a lobbyist in Brussels who works for an NGO there, about the situation in Brussels. And we’re hoping also to be joined by Martin Kessler, a longtime campaigner from Frankfurt, to talk briefly about the situation in his city.
The meeting is being recorded and will be on the UECNA website, hopefully by the end of the week, so people who aren’t able to come today will be able to see it later. We’ll also send a report to everyone on this discussion, and it’ll be on the website very shortly.
But the man who’s done the hard work is Bertie. So we’re going to start with a presentation from Bertie, followed by Klaas, and then hopefully Martin, and there’ll be plenty of time for questions and discussion before we end in an hour’s time.
Are you okay? Yes — right, okay, over to you, Bertie. Just before you start the screen — okay. Just before you start, Bertie — Vladimir, we can all hear you. Vladimir, if you want to mute yourself, thank you. Okay, Bertie, it’s all yours.
[2:42] Bertie Lloyd: Thanks. The slides on the screen — okay, yeah, they’re absolutely fine. Cool, excellent. So hi everyone, it’s great to be here, thank you. Thanks, John, and thanks to UECNA for organizing. I think I probably haven’t met quite a few people on the call, so just a brief bit of background on me: I’ve been at the Aviation Environment Federation for the last two and a half years. We’re a UK NGO covering all environmental issues relating to aviation — climate, noise, air pollution, biodiversity. We started about 50 years ago as a coalition focused on noise around airports, and have lots of members whose primary concern is noise. So it’s great to be able to work with UECNA on a major issue like aircraft night noise.
I’ll take you through the project UECNA is launching today: some background on the report, a bit of introduction on night flights that people might already be aware of, just to set the scene, and then the key findings from the data analysis, the literature review, and what this actually means for policy.
The broad project brief was to cover six areas: definitions of a night flight and restrictions at different airports around Europe; the key question of how many night flights there actually are; understanding what justifications industry gives for night operations; summarizing some of the latest health research; seeing how it’s impacted airport operations; and monitoring any trends that are developing to look out for.
A bit of introduction on night flights — this is from EASA. There were about 940,000 night arrivals and 930,000 night departures in 2023 across Europe, which is 350,000 more than there were in 2005.
On what exactly constitutes a night flight: they’re typically described as flights taking off or landing between 11pm and 7am. That’s the definition used by WHO, so it’s the one we’ve tended to use in this report. Some countries define this differently — 10pm to 6am is a common alternative — so there’s some additional analysis in the report using that window, for anyone working in a country that uses it.
You can get a sense of scale from this EASA figure — arrivals in blue and departures in yellow, by hour of the day. There’s a lull in the night window, but the shoulder periods show pretty large spikes at the start and end of the night, and still some background traffic during the night itself.
This is a map of the airports included in the study — essentially the 26 largest airports by passenger numbers in Europe, plus four key freight hubs: Leipzig, Luxembourg, Liège, and East Midlands. Geneva was also added as a key airport of interest. So it’s fairly widespread geographically — 17 countries — which I think is important, because night flights are often quite a local, context-specific issue. We tried to get a good range to understand things properly.
Then there’s the ICAO “balanced approach” to noise management, a widely followed system at airports: reduction of noise at source, land use planning, operational procedures, and operating restrictions. Noise at source and land use — pillars one and two — were largely out of scope for this report, so we focused on three and four. In a night-flight context, operational procedures tend to mean things like using a certain runway, altered approach paths, or at minimum some limits on the noisiest class of planes flying at night. Operating restrictions we split into limits, bands, and quotas: limits set a number of flights permitted; quotas are similar but weighted by how loud the aircraft are; and bands/curfews are periods of the night with no activity at all.
This table shows the different types and timings of restrictions at the airports in the study — along the bottom, time of day from 10pm to 7am in hourly sections, and each horizontal bar represents the window of an airport’s main operating restriction. Orange is operational procedures only, green is night-flight limits, blue is bands, purple is quotas. It’s probably easier to read in the report than go through it all now, but the key thing to note is that none of the airports we looked at implement a full eight-hour curfew through the night.
One of the key challenges was finding the right data for the question of how many night flights there actually are at these airports. I won’t go into loads of detail on methods, but the number of flights was estimated using data from the OpenSky-type performance data initiative, part of the Eurocontrol Aviation Intelligence Portal — it uses ADS-B data. This map shows the coverage of that data source; without needing to understand it in depth, it shows pretty good coverage across Europe, which was all we really needed for this project.
Moving on to the key output of the report — this table shows the name and country of each airport, passenger throughput at all hours of the day, the core night period (essentially the window during which the main restriction applies — so if there’s a ban, it’s just the window of the ban, rather than the wider operational restrictions), and the type of restriction in place. It’s worth mentioning that finding this information is quite challenging, so this is accurate to the best of our knowledge — I’ll come back to that.
Then the key figure: total number of night flights in 2025, in the 11pm–7am window. Going through some headlines — the airports are listed from most to least. At the top: Schiphol, Madrid, Barcelona, Leipzig, and Milan — all in the 35,000 to 50,000 night flights a year range. At the bottom end: Luxembourg, Geneva, Paris Orly, Liège, and Berlin — ranging from about 7,500 to 13,000. We estimate a total of 750,000 night flights across all these airports, which averages out at a little over 24,000 per airport — both very significant numbers, and quite shocking how high some of these figures are.
A couple more observations: airports typically implement limits and bands that don’t cover the full night period. For example, Heathrow’s limit is 5,800 within its restricted window, but across the whole night there are actually closer to 30,000 night flights there. It’s similar for airports with bands, like Frankfurt.
This next chart plots total passengers per year against estimated night flights in 2025. There’s a fairly clear trend — higher-passenger airports tend to have more night flights — with groupings of lower, medium, and higher night flights shown in green, yellow, and red. There’s a moderate correlation, with a few exceptions: cargo hubs, where passenger throughput is less of an indicator of activity, sit on a slightly different scale. Then you’ve got three of Europe’s largest airports out to the right — Frankfurt, Schiphol, and Heathrow — which have bans and limits in place, and it appears these are having some effect at keeping night flights lower than counterparts with similar passenger numbers, like Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona, whose night-flight numbers are significantly higher.
Below the trend line there’s a noticeable geographical grouping toward the northwest of Europe — airports with a lower ratio of night flights to total passengers. There are airports in that region above the line too, but every airport below the line is in that part of Europe: Luxembourg, Geneva, Berlin, and the three large airports mentioned.
This table shows all the airports in the study that implement a night-flight ban or limit, alongside the number of night flights recorded within that specific window. Dublin’s limit, for instance, applies from 11pm to 7am, so that’s the window the total covers. Geneva’s window is midnight to 6am. This basically shows that airports with limits tend to stick to them, with Lisbon a notable exception. For airports with full bands, the degree of traffic is quite variable — some are down at 350–400 a year, essentially one or two a day, while Luxembourg and Warsaw are close to 3,000 flights allowed during the ban period in that year.
A quick look at airlines: we split the data by airline too, and you can see the airlines with the most night flights to and from these 31 airports, alongside total flights for context. The list is pretty dominated by high-traffic passenger carriers — Ryanair, easyJet, and Lufthansa make up 16 of the 20 airlines on there — so on the whole, night flights appear largely to be used for leisure purposes by these carriers. There are a few exceptions: two cargo operators and two tour operators, which will similarly be feeding leisure flights. It’s pretty clear the cargo airlines have a higher proportion of night flights than passenger carriers do — DHL, for example, had 54,000 night flights out of a total of 82,000, a significant proportion.
That’s the data analysis wrapped up. On the literature review side, we looked at the latest health research. People may be familiar with the WHO environmental noise guidelines — recommending noise levels below 45 decibels overall, and below 40 at night. Using that 40-decibel figure, the European Environment Agency estimates that 5.6 million people are affected by harmful levels of aircraft night noise. The link to exposure isn’t something we directly tested in this study — that would be a good next step — but 5.6 million is one estimate out there.
We ran through recent studies on night noise, which has been linked to a wide range of health impacts: cardiovascular health, sleep, annoyance, and others. The review showed a steadily increasing number of published studies on night noise. Earlier work tended to focus more on annoyance, typically via surveys based on people’s perceptions; newer research covers a wider range of physiological effects, with more access to population-level data and wearable sleep tools that can actually assess people’s sleep patterns. The research is also becoming more targeted at isolating night noise from daytime noise, which is useful because it’s quite hard to untangle the two.
Next, comparing the popular industry justifications for night flights against some alternatives, and why a ban or curfew might be a good idea. The main industry narratives: economic benefits and time practicalities — night flights being necessary for next-day delivery, important for passenger convenience (arriving for a morning business meeting, or making a connection), and capacity — congested airports possibly needing night flights to increase capacity without building new infrastructure. Current policies being sufficient — the bulk of industry sentiment is that the first three pillars of the ICAO approach are good enough. Delays and emergencies — night as a buffer to clear delays built up through the day. And a consistent line questioning the health research — industry continually recommending further research before making changes.
Some quick counterpoints: the “economic benefit” argument typically refers to profitability and growth rather than operational necessity — which we’ll hear a bit more about from Frankfurt shortly — and it’s fair to question whether the benefits to passengers and airlines are worth the level of disruption experienced. We looked at five airports operating with night restrictions to show that night flights aren’t essential for an airport, or a region, to operate successfully. On “other policies being sufficient” — it’s very likely that bans and limits will be the only way of reaching the WHO guidelines, so if that’s the goal, other policies aren’t sufficient. On delays and emergencies — dispensations are often still permitted at airports with night bands, and the health research supports a precautionary approach.
Two more slides on trends: night flights are part of a bigger picture of growth in flight numbers generally, alongside airport expansion across Europe, with increasing commercial pressure to fit more flights into shoulder and night periods. It’s worth noting the increase in night flights in Europe has outpaced the increase in total flights, proportionally. There’s also the rise of online retail and next-day delivery expectations, adding pressure for overnight air freight — with implications for both noise and emissions, since goods that would previously have moved by slower, less intensive methods are now on overnight cargo flights. There’s a bit of a gap in the literature on how necessary this overnight air freight actually is — it doesn’t seem particularly well studied outside a business point of view.
There have also been several cases of airports breaking their own rules, with restrictions not being effectively enforced — headlines from Lisbon and Luxembourg, where there haven’t really been sanctions for airlines ignoring bans. Worth keeping an eye on as commercial pressure to squeeze in flights increases, and as airports consider limits and bands — whether the monitoring is actually effective.
Lastly, conclusions and recommendations. First observation: the rules on night flights across Europe are extremely varied, and communities are currently very exposed to the impacts of night flights. Four recommendations from the report — we haven’t recommended a Europe-wide blanket ban on night flights; as tempting as that is, local context matters, and there may be valid reasons for a bit of nighttime flying in some places, so we started from a slightly lower bar than a blanket ban.
First: standardized publication of night-flight rules across Europe — providing up-to-date, accurate information on this was quite difficult, and residents should at least be able to find out what standards airports are supposed to follow. Second, similarly: publication of night-flight statistics — the figures we’ve provided are a good starting point, but it would be much simpler for airports, or EASA, or another body, to mandate reporting and publish it annually; some airports already do this. Third: regular review of night-noise health research — the research is developing quickly, and it’s important policy keeps up, which doesn’t always happen. And fourth: policy to protect exposed residents — at a lot of airports the current noise climate is adversely impacting residents’ health, and tougher restrictions on night flights, including bands, are needed. There needs to be a commitment to continuous improvement toward the WHO-recommended exposure levels — maintaining current noise contours isn’t good enough; there needs to be actual improvement. As the health research develops, it’s important that this approach to managing noise stays adaptive, with policies regularly updated.
Thank you — that’s all my slides.
[27:26] John Stewart: Thank you very much indeed, Bertie. As you can possibly hear, my fire alarm has gone off in this building, so what I’m going to do is move on to Klaas and then Martin, who I’m glad to say has joined us. Klaas, I may disappear for a minute or two — don’t take it personally, I just want to sort out the fire alarm. But thank you so much, Bertie, that was full of real information. Klaas is from a Belgian NGO and is going to talk about the situation in Brussels.
[28:09] Klaas: Yes, thank you, John. Maybe while I’m starting some slides — I’ll share my screen — I’ll do a quick introduction. I work for a Dutch-speaking NGO in Belgium; we mainly focus on everything related to the environment, but we also have policy experts on different topics, and I work specifically on transport and aviation. I was asked to give an introduction on our work related to the ban on night flights we want to implement at Brussels Airport.
A bit of context: this is the coalition we built, named in Dutch — “We Are Awake” in English. In Dutch it has two implications: it literally means “we are awake,” but it also means “we are very concerned” — about the health impact of night flights, and everything related.
Why did we start this campaign? We started in 2022, because a new permit was being launched for Brussels Airport — a total repermitting process for the airport’s operations — and our goal was to create impact on that process and on the permit. Before that, there were many different organizations and resident groups, from Tervuren to Zaventem and many other towns and cities, each with their own group. Our goal was to unite everyone behind one common message and one common goal toward the airport.
We built a requirement bundle with four simple demands — simple, but I think quite effective. First, a ban on night flights — that’s what we’ve been discussing throughout this presentation. Some airports already have it; in Brussels it isn’t implemented yet, so we’re arguing it’s necessary. Second, a cap of 220,000 flight movements for the airport. For context, as of 2025 there were about 200,000 flight movements, and the airport itself is planning to expand to 242,000 by 2032 — so within five years, almost 40,000 extra flight movements, a big increase, and one of the things we really want to cap. Third, a CO2 cap for the airport — we see talk of this, or implementation, in several European countries, including the UK and the Netherlands, so we’re looking into it for Brussels too. And fourth, noise and flight-frequency standards — because most noise measures are expressed as averages, and we think flight frequency is also a very important aspect of what people are actually exposed to.
That’s the context and our goals. On how we’re putting pressure on the airport and trying to influence policy — it’s really a bit of everything. We launched a campaign website, united around 18 different resident groups to speak with one voice rather than everyone pushing a slightly different message. Studies have also been really important — we commissioned some ourselves and used others that came out over the years. One report calculated the health cost to society around Brussels Airport at an estimated €1 billion a year from night flights specifically, and estimated a health-impact cost of about €36,000 per night flight — so with 16,000 flights a year at night, that adds up quickly.
We’ve used a lot of tools — petitions, fundraising — to put pressure on governments and the airport. Press and media are a really important part of this: we’ve launched opinion pieces, put our studies in the press, and worked with all the resident groups together. For me, one of the biggest and most important aspects of building this coalition is moving from a NIMBY dynamic to one united front. With 18 different resident groups all saying the same thing individually, the message becomes “not above my head, not in my community” — but combined, we can say it’s not about the flights above any one person’s head, it’s about there being too many flights for the whole area, and that installing a ban on night flights matters for the health and sleep quality of the hundreds of thousands of people around the airport.
Two quick examples of actions: on the left, a protest march we did from Zaventem to Brussels Airport with hundreds of people, saying “enough is enough — be aware that people live here, please do something about it.” On the right, a smaller action — 20 or 30 of us outside the residence of the Flemish prime minister, dressed in pajamas, saying “we are awake, we can’t sleep because of night flights” — with a bit of humor in it. We launched a press release, it was picked up really well by the press, and we got the opportunity to talk with the prime minister.
My main message is that it’s important to bring all these types of actions and tools together, and to connect with the many different resident groups toward one big goal — in this case, the ban on night flights, and our other policy measures.
To end: I started the campaign in 2022; the new permit for Brussels Airport was then cancelled by a judge, and negotiations for a new permit are starting again, to be issued in the coming years. So it’s very important for us to pick up the pace again with this coalition and take on the fight. I’ll leave it there — I hope I was more or less within my time — but happy to take questions afterward. Thank you.
[37:57] John Stewart: Thank you, Klaas — and you’ll see lots of thumbs-up coming up on the screen, people enjoyed that. Let’s move on to Martin. Martin Kessler, thank you very much for joining us — I know you’re a busy man, you run a business, and this isn’t the best time of day for you, but thank you for joining. Martin has been a longtime resident and campaigner at Frankfurt Airport, and is going to talk for no more than five minutes about the situation there, and in particular how the night-flight ban was introduced and didn’t really affect the economy. After Martin speaks there’ll be time for questions and comments. Over to you, Martin.
[38:48] Martin Kessler: Yes, thank you, John. I’ve been 40 years engaged as a campaigner around Frankfurt Airport, and the success we had 15 years ago was a night-flight ban — a restriction from 11pm to 5am, no flights at all.
Frankfurt is one of the big hubs in Europe, not only for passengers but for cargo. Frankfurt has about 460,000 movements a year, and when the court decision happened, within six weeks all the stakeholders had to adopt it and accept that in future there’d be a night-flight ban in Frankfurt. That was a totally game-changing situation. It was a decision at the beginning of October, 2011 — 15 years ago — and it was really extremely difficult at first: Lufthansa had to change its flight tables, freight had to be reorganized. But it works, to this day, legally, by that court decision — nobody changes it anymore.
In practice, every night it works: from 11pm, departures aren’t happening anymore. Last incoming flights from home carriers with home-based status arrive up to midnight, so there are still flights coming in but none going out. From midnight to 5am, there are no flights at all, except emergencies. It works. Lufthansa invested, in the time after the decision, in expanding cargo facilities, and Frankfurt is still one of the big cargo hubs in Europe alongside Paris.
Passenger and flight numbers didn’t decrease because of the night-flight ban. It was a big change not to operate 24 hours, but there were savings on the other side too — at night they could do maintenance and needed less personnel. And if you look at what had actually been flying at night before, it wasn’t the normal airlines — it was what used to be called charter airlines, today it’s low-cost airlines, doing tourism-driven flying at night to use the planes more, arriving late or departing early. Cargo wasn’t as dependent on the night — they found a way to operate cargo continuously without trouble, shifting flights to before 11pm or after 5am.
Our remaining trouble today is the early-morning noise — between 5 and 6am, a lot of incoming flights still disturb people living under the flight path. So we want to try to expand the night-flight ban from six hours to seven, seven and a half, or eight hours — eight hours being the normal amount of time a human being needs to sleep.
So it’s successful — it works in Frankfurt, we have no troubles, everybody accepts it. We monitor it with the noise-measurement system, so we know exactly what’s happening, and if anything doesn’t fit the rules, the responsible ministry has to report to the public why there was a flight — say there was an emergency, or it could be weather, a storm in the evening, that kind of exception. But normally it works, and people who suffered from this noise before are very happy. It’s proof, if you want it, that this is achievable even at a big international hub like Frankfurt.
[43:11] John Stewart: Thank you, Martin, thank you very much indeed for that, and thank you to all the speakers. We’ll now take some questions and comments — a number of different people are on the call. If there are any journalists on the call, do you want to go first? [pause] Nobody’s admitting they’re a journalist — okay, I’ll just take comments as they arise. If you raise your hand, and maybe put your camera on when you speak, we’ll go into questions and comments. Who’d like to go first? Yes — Dominique, and everybody: do you want to introduce yourself, and if you’re from an organization, say which one. Dominique, you’ll be moving around, but you’re stable now, so glad to see that.
[44:36] Dominique: Yes — thank you for your very good presentations, and this fantastic study, I thought it was really interesting. I’m from an association near Beauvais Airport, which is a low-cost airport. We had the chance to get a ban from midnight to 5am — five hours — with 25 derogations if needed, for Ryanair aircraft returning to their base at Beauvais. It’s quite well respected, so we’re quite lucky about that.
I’ve seen in France that we had ten “balanced approach” studies, and there’s a consultation from the European Commission about implementation of the balanced approach regulation — Regulation 598 from 2014, I think. I think this relates to night flights as well, because in these balanced-approach studies, what we wanted was studies on bans or limitations during the night period, and this wasn’t accepted at all at the airports where the balanced-approach study was carried out.
I don’t know if you all contributed to that European Commission consultation, but I think we all know this balanced-approach regulation is based on the ICAO balanced-approach concept, which was really designed to prevent operating restrictions at airports — the European version has the same effect. We also know there’s an agreement between the US and Europe restricting Europe from adopting operating restrictions at airports. So we’re very limited in what we can do as residents around airports — there’s a ready excuse from our government, saying, well, we can’t have caps or bans at night because the European Commission doesn’t like it, they want us to implement noise insulation instead of operating restrictions. I don’t know if you have the same experience at home, in your various countries, and whether you contributed to that consultation.
[48:23] John Stewart: Thank you very much, Dominique — and before I bring in Meera, thanks to Dominique, who’s used AI to help translate the report into French, Spanish, and Italian. That’s absolutely wonderful, and we’ll be putting that on our website by the end of the week at the latest. I’ve put my email in the chat — if anyone wants a copy of the report sent straight away, or has other questions, feel free to email me. Meera, welcome, it’s your turn now.
[49:07] Meera: Thanks so much, thanks a lot, Bertie, for sharing the results of your study — I’m already looking forward to sharing it with our wider network. I’m here for Stay Grounded, an international network for the reduction of aviation. Also really inspiring to hear the examples from Brussels and Frankfurt — Martin and Klaas, thanks for those very concrete examples.
I wanted to ask you, Bertie — I was a bit surprised, to be honest, to hear that you’re not recommending a ban on night flights. What led you to that? Because for us as campaign organizations, it would be really helpful to be able to point to studies that recommend stricter measures — because in negotiations, if you ask for X, Y, Z, you’ll typically only end up getting X. We’re also arguing for a ban on night flights as a campaign goal in Brussels.
Last thing — I wanted to invite everyone to a webinar we’re hosting just before the next presentation of this study, one hour earlier, on night flights and the connection to promoting alternatives — night trains, not night flights. Hope to see you all there.
[50:46] John Stewart: Brilliant, thank you, Meera. Bertie?
[50:50] Bertie Lloyd: Yeah — I think maybe it came across in the presentation like we were actively not recommending a ban in the report. It’s not written like that; hopefully it can be used to support bans on a case-by-case basis. The recommendations are more from a practical point of view of what could be implemented everywhere across the study, rather than a ban specifically — which isn’t currently on the table in the UK, for example, but we’d very much like it to be, and hope the work can support that happening. It’s more that there’s variation locally across the study. But there’s nothing in the study that recommends against a ban anywhere — it’s very much in favor.
[51:53] John Stewart: Thanks, Bertie. Do you want to introduce yourself, and then we’ll go to yours?
[52:01] Fifi: Hello everyone, I’m Fifi, secretary of UECNA, and I’m from the Athens Airport area. I just want to congratulate Bertie on this study — some really interesting figures are coming out. For example, I saw that Paris [Orly?] has the same passengers per year as us, but night flights are three times fewer, and we even have more night flights than Schiphol Airport. That says something about the situation here in Athens.
I also want to thank Klaas for the interesting findings from their study — I saw it mentioned in the chat too. If the figure is really €36,000 per flight in health cost, we may need that study ourselves, because it would really suit our purposes here. I wanted to ask — was that figure specific to your area, or could it be applied elsewhere? Is €36,000 per flight a general figure for any country or area, or specific to Brussels?
[54:02] Klaas: Yes, a very good question. I can definitely share the report and study — it’s publicly available on our website, I can send the link to John. The study was specific to Brussels Airport — it took into account the populated areas and how densely populated the surrounding region is, so that has to be taken into consideration if you try to apply the report elsewhere. But I think in general it’s very useful for other airports too, and what’s interesting about the study is that it puts a price on what airports always claim about economic benefit and jobs — it puts a price on the health costs too, on the problems people experience.
To be genuinely useful it would need to be compared with the earnings airports actually make — I don’t have specific numbers on that, but I think it’s already interesting to hear from Martin that in Frankfurt, implementing the ban didn’t have implications for the economy or for Lufthansa’s further investment. That’s already an indication that it is possible — maybe difficult, but if you change some operational aspects of your airport, it’s definitely doable.
[56:11] John Stewart: Thank you very much. Jos — I think this will be the last contribution, as we’re coming up on time.
[56:19] Jos: Okay, yes — I’m also from the coalition around Brussels Airport. My question relates to the comments we’ve just had, and it’s really a question for Bertie Lloyd, about something I miss a little in the study. We’ve heard that the health costs of night flights are enormous — Klaas gave us figures of €36,000 per flight, €1 billion a year if you account for the whole health impact in the Brussels region. That’s the cost side.
What we should do, I think, to make our case more — I’m an economist, so I believe things only really change when money is involved — is compare these health costs with the earnings airports generate from their night-flight business model, because that’s their vested interest. Why do they open at night? How many flights, and how much income and profit does that generate? Then we’d have a real money-based comparison, and I think it would easily show that the health costs of night flights are much higher than the earnings from them.
Related to that: we always talk about a ban on night flights, but I think that should be the ultimate result — in Brussels we’re increasingly talking about shifting night flights to daytime instead. The business models for night flights were presumably built around the earnings airports get from operating at night, but when they close at night, nothing stops those flights moving to daytime — there are open slots beyond the shoulder periods. It’s a question of adapting the night-flight business model to a day-flight business model, which might take a few years, but as Frankfurt has shown, it’s possible — not a dead end. But to bring clarity to what airports actually earn from night flights, we have no data, and it’s not in the report either. It would be very useful to have that. Bertie, do you want to say something about this?
[59:22] John Stewart: Maybe I’ll say something first — we were on a fairly tight budget, and we couldn’t ask AEF to do everything. We were also aware that a lot of health studies had already been done, so we asked Bertie to summarize them rather than do fresh detailed work on the economics. But you make a really good point about that. Bertie?
[59:52] Bertie Lloyd: Yeah — I’d be shocked if even an airport could produce a study claiming night flights are worth a billion euros a year to Brussels. It would be great to have some estimates of what the supposed economic benefit actually is in each area. I think I’ve seen some work along those lines in Brisbane, in Australia, but I haven’t checked the methodology closely. It would be very useful, and I’d expect it would work in favor of a ban, since the health costs would likely be significantly higher than any economic benefit gained by the airport. It may be a follow-up study, if we can raise the money — you’ve just suggested it.
[1:01:05] John Stewart: Looking forward to that. It’s time to bring things to an end — thank you all very much, particularly Bertie, Klaas, and Martin, for three excellent presentations. As I said, contact me — my email’s in the chat — if you’d like a copy of the report or have further questions. Copies of the report, including Dominique’s translations, will be on the UECNA website by the end of the week, hopefully by tomorrow. So it just leaves me to thank you all very much for coming — this time of day is a bit awkward for some people, suits others well — but thank you very much for contributing to this really interesting session.