"Nostrildamus nose the future"Nostrildamus says:
- Infratil's Charles Buchanan will shortly unveil his plans to stuff our ears with plane noise 24 hours a day.
- He will brandish carrots and sticks as if they were real.
- He will repeat the mantra that the airport will have to close if the proposals aren't accepted.
- He will never say that he will close the airport - far too personal.
- He will want to distract attention from the fact that the closure of the airport is a purely commercial decision, already more than half-made.
- He will want to abdicate responsibility to 'prevailing circumstances', and shift the blame onto an 'uncooperative' local Council.
- He will alarm the Council with the threat of dozens of jobs lost if the airport closes.
- He will cajole the Council with promises of thousands of jobs created if he gets his way.
- He will present the reports he's commissioned as proof of his case, because there is nothing else that supports his claims.
- He will never say that that the night flights he's asking for won't be enough to make the airport break even, let alone become profitable.
- He will say that night flights will be the catalyst that will make the Master Plan achievable and the airport profitable.
- He will never say that every penny of profit will be repatriated to New Zealand in the most tax-efficient way possible.
- He will never admit that the Master Plan, which has missed every significant target and forecast, is a work of unachievably optimistic guesstimation.
- He will muddy the water with promises of flights to New York.
- He will not explain that the carrier (currently called Acer Airways) says it won't exist until 2013 at the earliest.
- TDC's Cllr Bayford is unaware that KCC's Leader Paul Carter is using him as a disposable human shield.
- He will continue to champion the airport as a 'good thing'.
- He will do everything he can to ensure that TDC Labour don't have a free vote on the issue.
- He will continue the fiction that TDC Conservatives will have a free vote on the issue.
- He will continue to use last minute procedural and legal ploys.
- He will seek to skew the public consultation towards a 'Yes' result.
- He will ignore a 'No' result.
- Thanet District Council denies that it holds any records of legal advice on airport planning issues, night flights or the S106 agreement in the last 10 years.
- Nostrildamus has framed copies of the legal advice TDC has received.
- The legal advice confirms that the airport is long overdue for a formal planning application, due to the incremental development over the years.
- The legal advice confirms that the intensification of use resulting from night flights would require a planning application.
- TDC dreads this: it will highlight a decade of slapdash management and craven fawning.
- The airport dreads this too: it would automatically trigger an EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) lasting a couple of years, while the airport continues to lose £5m a year.
KCC, TDC and Infratil want the night flights proposals to be rubber-stamped with the minimum of fuss.
And they don't give a toss about you.