[silisili]

UPS actually bought and destroyed thousands of homes near their end of the airport about 20 years ago, under the guise of 'noise', but realistically for expansion of warehousing. Now, I guess I feel slightly less upset by that (my childhood home was one of them).

[xhkkffbf]

Same thing happened to a friend who lived near the Albany airport. They gave him some song and dance about how it wasn't safe for people. But then after the deal was all done, they ended up selling the land to one of those hotel companies that wanted to have 100+ people sleep there each night. But they weren't permanent residents so it was different.

[Ferret7446]

Both can be true at the same time (or all three if you include safety in addition to noise).

[silisili]

True, but rather doubtful. UPS has owned that part of the airport for longer than I've been alive. As a kid, yeah sometimes a plane comes over but nobody really seemed to care.

Fast fwd 15 years and now the city is telling us how unsafe it is to live there, passing out studies about how airplane noise will ruin your life, etc. And they made the buyout 'optional', knowing they'd railroad the holdouts, which they did. They'd tear down every house and the road leading to your house as they went, until the holdouts gave in.

All of a sudden my neighborhood is gone. And that awful, noisy, unsafe to live in place...is full of workers in cheap steel warehouses. I guess it's more safe for them.

Many people may not realize, but UPS and Ford absolutely own Louisville. If either says jump, the city government will ask how high?

[jacquesm]

> Fast fwd 15 years and now the city is telling us how unsafe it is to live there

I think their point just got made in a way that can't be ignored.

[silisili]

Fair point!

Oddly enough the pamphlets they kept sending out focused on irritability, poor grades, confusion, sleep problems, etc, and never mentioned the possibility of being fragged by a wayward jet.

I say that only partially in jest, looking at a map now, we were only 2 or so miles as the crow flies from the end of their runway and in the direct path..

[jacquesm]

On a long enough timescale even improbably things will happen. The pamphlets would not mention that possibility because that would imply that the operator thought that a crash was possible, which would have caused their whole operation to be reviewed. By pointing out all but that, and by focusing on things that they could point at without having proof that living in the path of an active runway is risky (it is, take-off and landing are the most risky phases of flight) they were trying to get their way and check off a possible future headline without being seen as alarmist or engaging in risky behavior.

I'm trying to imagine this same thing happening with a subdivision in the same location where this plane crashed and the headlines that would have generated. As bad as this is, that alternative disaster would have been on an entirely different level.

I also hope that as a result of this crash there will be a global review of the placing of airports, especially the ones that are pretty much in cities with the flight path directly over houses during final approach and just after take-off.

This is a good example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiPyrfEuOeo

And yes, they're space constrained. But, given enough time...