tell us the story behind the picture........
I can see a protest against an airport, did it work!!

You need a bit of Swampy!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampy

The story is quite simpel. Some politicians thought it would be a good idea to make the formar military airforcebase near Enschede (the Netherlands) into a airport. At first glance it seemed like a good idea (although I live near the route were the planes will take off and I will suffer a lot of noice). When I startet to look into that I found out that that was not the only problem.

The group of people planning the airport suffer from tunnelvision. The figures they base their case on are carefully chosen and manipulated to make it look good. I'm afraid that these figures and the calculations based on them are very fictional. They refuse to have their figures checked by anyone not payed by them. They refuse to take notice of any negative report, also saying that because they did not pay these scientist they don't have to take them serious.

In their comunications they present potential exploiteurs (is that an English word?) who turn out to be completely not serious. They say that the whole infrastructure is already there but in their own plans they only use the runway (all buildings, taxiways, roads and railway will have to be build), still they claim that it will cost almost no taxmoney. They calculated the influence on the enviroment based on the minimum of passengers/year that the airport would be profitable and refuse to calculate the influence if the airport would be more succesful etc. etc. etc.

In the Netherlands there have been several big infrastructural projects that have become financial disasters. This project is going exactly the same way. Some politicians think it will look good on them that they started such a project, some people will earn a lot of money building it and the taxpayer will be paying a lot of money for a very long time because it will never be profitable.

For me it started out as a protest because of the enviroment and my own situation ('living under the runway') but it has now turned into a protest against bad leadership and politics.

Oh yes, there is a airport on the other side of the German/Dutch border at less than 35 miles that is having a difficult time surviving. I do not think that is a good sign for a new airport here, and I don't think it is a good idea to start a competing airport so close to the other one in a area that is relatively thinly populated.

So it's the usual story with projects like this..........

Politicians are daft, and I really do not understand why on earth we take the trouble to go voting !
The only purpose we as citizens have is to pay taxes .
And we never pay enough, so taxes go up every time the politicians are short of money.
And every so now and than politicians have ideas like this airport which cost a lot of money , and will never beprofitable, but someone , somehow is going to make a lot of money from it .
Thanks to the taxpayer .

Gentlemen, the time is upon us, I smell revolution in the air.

I'm afraid not, too many people believe what these politicians say and really think that our region's economy will be doomed without this airport.

I suggest they make a racetrack from the old airport

2cv WM 2015 Enschede airport!!