Greg O’Brien, Kyneton
Ken Galbraith asserts (‘Veil of secrecy’, Opinions, February 26) that an information flyer about Kyneton Airfield is not credible.
He used his own interpretation of the role of just one group of scientific studies establishing that Chicago’s airport causes significant harm to health to try to discredit all the other pertinent facts and studies in the flyer as untrustworthy. Because Chicago’s airport is much larger than Kyneton’s, Ken concludes that the Chicago research showing aviation’s “alarming” impact on human health is not transferrable to Kyneton. Ken somehow manages to ignore in the same flyer a large scientific study of many smaller airports that are more Kyneton’s size and type (light planes), where the lead levels in the blood of children living close to these airports were tested and found to be significantly elevated, in the context of well corroborated scientific research that even infinitesimally small amounts of lead can have major adverse consequences for children’s futures. The Chicago airport scientific studies unequivocally establish the statistical medical risk of living near an airport. Many factors need to be considering in calculating the degree of health risk in Kyneton. This point seems to have been clearly made in the flyer that our council has been negligent in failing to do so. Ken’s seat-of-his-pants “she’ll be right” isn’t good enough.
According to my own two-second research, Chicago’s airport has 29 square kilometres of buffer zone – Kyneton’s has less than .2 of one square kilometre, so the official Area of Operations for Kyneton’s airport is the town itself. Planes have to fly low over the town to take off and land (as low as 60 feet over my house), and the flying circuits are over residences too. Unlike at commercial airports, the destination and the journey are often just Kyneton itself, with local planes flying round and round over the town’s residences, thereby localising the aviation pollution over residences.
