Following Gee's demonstration, public support for the airport appeared to increase, although far fewer people lived near its location then than they do today, and within five years the airport was built. There were a handful of large factories at Silvertown but no ExCel centre, no Canary Wharf mall or skyscrapers and no City Hall. Remember, most of the area was dilapidated and in need of regeneration. They were given two hours to come to a specially prepared viewing site on the Royal Docks, where they could watch the plane's movements themselves. The landing was promoted as a spectacle, and on the day residents were able to listen to some 'test' landings and take-offs. To this day there is a plaque which marks Gee's effort at the entrance to Heron Quays DLR station, which now sits on the exact spot the plane landed. He successfully landed the plane slap bang in the middle of the dock area, which would now be impossible due to the intense, dense construction of tall buildings from the late 1980s and the arrival of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and its elevated viaduct section in 1987. This plaque is on the ground floor entrance to Heron Quays DLR station (Image: Callum Marius) READ MORE: The new London buses that charge wirelessly from the roof and are a world first On June 27, 1982, one of their pilots, Captain Harry Gee, flew a deHavilland Dash-7 aircraft (a popular small plane with regional airlines at the time, and still used by regional airlines in Canada today) into the middle of Canary Wharf, an even smaller dock, just up the river from the proposed site of the airport. In order to demonstrate having an airport where planes consistently performed 'STOL' moves was feasible, the promoters of the airport teamed up with Plymouth-based now-defunct airline Brymon Airways to prove the experts wrong. It was one of the key arguments aviation experts had against the construction of a new London airport on the Royal Docks back in the early 1980s. As the runway is on a dock, surrounded by water, pilots must perform a 'STOL' (short take off/landing) move to avoid landing prematurely or overshooting the runway as doing so could be catastrophic. If you've ever taken a plane which landed at City Airport, you'll have felt the descent from the sky to the runway is particularly steep.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |