There is now a push for Auckland Council to ban private choppers in residential areas altogether when they next review the unitary plan for Auckland city, and at least 2 councillors now back that. And one of the councillors backing it is the councillor whose ward covers the Mowbray property.
Now I'm sorry, but helicopters are a legitimate form of travel for people who can afford them. They are fast, they avoid traffic jams, and if that is what the Mowbray-Williams family want to use to make their lives easier so they can get from A to B as quickly as possible, all power to them. They can afford it.
I feel sorry for the neighbours, I do. I have empathy. I wouldn't want to live next to a property with a chopper that was landing consistently, but nor would I want to live next to a property where the neighbour has a noisy motorbike.
And yet - we're not banning noisy motorbikes, are we?
Some noisy motorbikes, by the way, are as noisy as choppers. They can hit 116 decibels, which is pretty much exactly the same as the 118 decibels that you can get if you're standing right next to a chopper landing.
And there is no ban on those noisy motorbikes, is there? There's no council limit on how many times your neighbour can use one of them, there's no council saying: "Oh, you can use it 10 times a month, but that's it, no more." So why are we doing the same with the chopper?
I can't help but feel that some of this anti-chopper sentiment is coming from an anti-rich person place, and we need to get over that.
Cause we are lucky, actually, that the Mowbrays have chosen to live in New Zealand. These people are gangster rich, they can live anywhere in the world, and yet they're living here in New Zealand.
They're living in Auckland, they're providing work for the people who work in their household, they are paying their mega-dollar taxes into our country, they are pumping money into this economy.
Let's not make it harder for people like that. Let's not make it easier for people like that to leave this country by getting weird about helicopters.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
How many helicpter licences per sq lilometre is reasonable?
The Mowbrays may decide to leave.......
A long bow to draw comparing a helicopter to a motorbike…. For starters one has rotors and generates a whole lot of down wash…
Likewise, a long bow to consider downwash is a factor when, I would suggest, the major objection under discussion is noise. With a helicopter, noise can vary with make, model and configuration but is otherwise unavoidable. With a motorcycle, noise is also dependent upon make, model and configuration. For the most part, a 'standard' motorcycle is relatively quite but after market exhaust systems are the major noise culprit. (The foregoing is from someone who has been an aircraft engineer, including helicoters, and an active motorcyclist for more than 60 years).
Eh bro, you should hear the noise from the Harleys around my whare !
Extra good when we wind up the beats on da amps every weekend.
Da cops can't do anything , eh
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