The Environment

It is the policy of West Auckland Airport Company Ltd to take all practicable steps to reduce the environmental impact of the airport, while recognising that airports are essential parts of the transport and tourism industries.  

 

Weed Control: The Airport has been researching and experimenting with non-chemical control of the Alligator weed that has long invaded the ditches on the Kaipara and choked the drains. Letting in controlled amounts of seawater has proven effective, and is much kinder to the Inanga and juveniles of other fish species that breed in the harbour, compared to spraying weedkiller.   This minimises the use of diggers to keep the ditches flowing freely.  Further work is being done in conjunction with the Council waterways biologists and the method developed is likely to be rolled out by the Council to other properties on the Kaipara Harbour and its rivers.

​

Bird Control: Work on this has also been quite effective, and by studying the habits of the birds and making the airport less attractive to them, its been possible to make the birds spend more time elsewhere. Skydive Auckland runs a bird scaring device on their swooping pond for the same reason... that's what causes the loud 'shotgun' type booms at regular intervals. The birds are not keen to settle if they think there are shooters in the area.  With our 'Aimm' Movement Monitoring service now used by nearly half the active NZ airports, we use our client newsletters to spread the suggestions for non-lethal bird control to many other airports in NZ and Australia.

​

Low-emission Aircraft: The Airport's flight training aircraft have been low-emission for a long time, and produce less than half the emissions of a Cessna or Piper training aircraft. This is due to the lighter weight of the Tecnam aircraft used at West Auckland, and because their 1990s designed Rotax engines are considerably more fuel efficient than the 1950s designed Lycoming and Continental engines traditionally used for training. The Rotaxes also use unleaded road vehicle fuel ('MoGas') getting a similar Km/Litre to an efficient car,  rather than leaded aviation fuel ('Avgas') so there is a worthwhile benefit there too. There is already an Electric Helicopter based at the airport, ZK-IAB, suitable airport maintenance tasks are carried out using an electric ground vehicle, and the Airport is actively investigating moving to electric training aircraft as soon as practical.

​

Discharges: All fuel, oil and aircraft waste is disposed of in accordance with environmental regulations, and recycled whenever possible.

 

Noise: Aircraft operating from the Airport are required to use noise reduction operations whenever possible. However, all forms of transport inevitably create noise... such as the railway that runs past the Eastern end of the Airport with trains at various times of the day and night. It is the policy of the Airport to reduce its noise profile as much as practicable. Hence the 'Aircraft' and  'Flight Path' policies above. If you feel that a regulation has been breached then please contact us to we can investigate. 

 

Suggestions: Any practical suggestions for further reducing the environmental impact of the airport would be welcomed, will be considered by the Airport Safety Committee and Operator's Committee, if necessary passed to the appropriate authorities for consideration, and adopted if approved.