Although the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, which will likely have a lot more landing aircraft closer to the ground passing over than with current operations, definitely has the money and will to fight it!
Taking off from Heathrow, aircraft initially follow Noise Preferential Routes (NPR’s), which constitute the first part of the various Standard Instrument Departures (SID’s).
These are designed to avoid or minimise noise nusiance to local areas.
On westerly operations, which accounts for about 70% of operations during the year, departures heading west towards Windsor, either turn to fly well south of the town, or fly between Windsor and Slough, overhead the open area between Eton and the M4/Slough.
Westerly departures from a new northern runway, would follow similar routings.
On easterlies, the approach path centreline for the current northern runway (09L) is directly overhead the Windsor town centre and the castle. This presents the worst noise nuisance for Windsor.
Aircraft landing on 09R fly just to the south of the town and affect far fewer homes.
An easterly approach to a new northern runway, would pass north of the town, overhead the open space between Eton and Slough.
With 3 runways, the likelihood is that Windsor will experience reduced noise impact, even with a significant increase in movements.
Aircraft noise is much reduced these days, compared to the 1970’s and 80’s, or even the early 00’s.
I can speak from direct experience of living in the centre of Windsor, not far from the castle, for nearly 10 years from the late 70’s until the late 80’s.
Easterly landings passed directly overhead. It was very noisy on those days.
Modern airliners are a world apart from those noisy Tridents, 727’s, DC9’s, early (classic) 747’s, Tristars, DC10’s, 707’s, DC8’s etc, that flew overhead every couple of minutes.
After moving from Windsor, I lived in Maidenhead for 8 years.
Aircraft noise was almost a non-issue and that was back then!
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