Greg O’Brien, Kyneton
Darcy Black made some errors in his letter (‘What are the facts’, Opinions, March 26).
I am not a member of the Kyneton Airport Research Information Group, the only group I am a member of is a landcare and revegetation group. If he knows that KARIG consists of three people, he knows more than I do.
Mr Black claims that I purchased a property blissfully unaware that it was at the end of a runway. I am not deaf and blind, which I would surely have to be to not know there is an airfield 500 metres from the Kyneton town boundary that includes nearly the whole town in its area of operations.
Mr Black did say one thing that was correct about “a few light aircraft”. This is what the air traffic has dropped to over Kyneton for the past three years so that residents forget about the noise and carcinogenic lead produced by light aircraft while the council slowly moves toward giving the pilots, who are mostly men from Melbourne, the expansion plan they want.
The air traffic up to 2015 was in the Kyneton Aero Club’s own figures, 192 flights a week, now I believe it is down to about 12 overflights a week.
Mr Black talks about “mysterious”. What is mysterious is how, with approximately 50 planes hangared at the airport and usually with planes flying in from all over the state, the air traffic at Kyneton has dropped to “just a few light aircraft”.
I contacted the mysterious KARIG and they sent me Darcy Black’s email to them in which he wrote, “I received your very informative fact sheet three but have not received one or two, would you be able to send them to me?”.
So Mr Black has gone from finding KARIG fact sheets to be very informative, to making wild claims about my involvement. He seems to be following the Kyneton Aero Club and Macedon Ranges Shire Council modus operandi of saying things that are fundamentally believable but completely untrue to justify their support of the expansion plans for Kyneton airport.
