action for airfields
In ten years time many of the airfields available to us today could well be closed. The bulldozers will have moved in and the land transformed into “Science Parks” and housing estates with names like “Spitfire Close” as the only reminder of former uses. 
There will be no more fly-ins and local airshows in the UK because there are no places left where such events can be held.
•	Light aircraft have been banned from all the UK’s regional airports. 
•	The smaller airports have all become housing and trading estates.    
•	The country’s remaining rural airfields have been restricted to ten movements per day under new national planning guidelines.
You think this won’t happen? It is starting to happen already:
•	Airports such as Luton, Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol are placing more and more restrictions on GA. 
•	Doncaster, Sunderland, Leavesden and Ipswich are only some of the airports that have been closed in recent years, and many more are on the danger list – Rochester, and North Weald to name just two. 
•	More and more rural airfields are victims of planning restrictions, and several local authorities are now seeking to apply these restrictions across the board by incorporating them into their Local Plans as formal planning policy.  
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It is not too late to reverse this trend, but we MUST act now. The most immediate threat is from local authorities, keen to release land for development, who see airfields as convenient sites that they can classify as brown field. While organisations like AOPA and the PFA do much good work for aviation, we feel that a separate single-issue organisation is needed to fight this threat. 
We are a group of people from all over the UK who care deeply about the future of light aviation. Many of us have been involved in campaigns to save individual airfields. We now believe that it is time to get together and pool our resources, We have decided to create a nationwide network of supporters with the intention of being able to quickly and easily 
•	alert the whole aviation community whenever an airfield comes under threat;
•	enlist the community to write letters of support for threatened airfields;
•	keep the community informed about specific airfield campaigns.
•	mobilise public support for airfields to make it harder for local authorities and developers to target them for housing and industry. 
•	counter the small but increasingly influential anti-aviation lobby that is determined to restrict all private flying.
You can find out more about the campaign from our web site at http://www.airfields.org.uk
Could we please ask you to complete and return the attached form, or register on-line at http://www.airfields.org.uk/register.htm? 
You will be helping in the fight to defend our airfields from the threat of closure and to preserve them for the future.
Please note: We will use your details only to send you information about our campaign, and we promise that we will not pass them on to any third party without your express permission