The Intermediary – March 2026 - Flipbook - Page 16
RESIDENTIAL
Opinion
Aircraft noise:
The next
flood risk
broker completes on
a £450,000 mortgage
for a young family
in Hertfordshire.
The survey came
back clean, the
searches showed no flooding concerns,
and everyone was satisfied. Within
months, it’s peak summer season and
flight volumes have ramped up to
record levels, and the family discovers
that aircra pass overhead every
90 seconds during peak hours. The
family wants to know why nobody
warned them.
This isn’t a hypothetical. UK
aviation has bounced back from
Covid-19 with extraordinary force.
According to the Civil Aviation
Authority (CAA), 302 million
passengers passed through UK airports
in 2025 – a record, surpassing prepandemic levels for the first time.
Passenger numbers have tripled since
1989, and one in three people surveyed
by the CAA plan to fly even more
this year.
For communities living under
flight paths, the skies have never
been busier. And they are about to get
busier still.
A
A perfect storm
The Government has thrown its
weight behind a wave of airport
expansion. Gatwick has been approved
for a second runway. Luton has
consent to nearly double its capacity
to 32 million passengers, adding up
to 78,000 additional flights per year.
Heathrow is under active review for a
third runway, with Ministers aiming
14
The Intermediary | March 2026
for flights to take off from it by 2035.
Stansted and Manchester have both
already exceeded their pre-Covid
passenger numbers.
Analysis by My Flight Path
estimates that approved and planned
airport expansions will add 600,000
flights to UK skies annually – a 22%
increase that would take the country
from approximately 2.7 million flights
to 3.3 million.
This maers for mortgage
advisers, because aircra noise is
one of the most significant and most
overlooked factors affecting residential
property values.
Research consistently shows that
homes beneath busy flight paths can
lose between 10% to 25% of their value
compared to equivalent properties
outside noise-affected areas.
Our own analysis of the Gilston
New Town development in
Hertfordshire – a planned community
of up to 10,000 homes siing directly
beneath Stansted’s departure routes –
identified potential aggregate property
value losses of between £960m and
£1.15bn across the scheme.
Yet unlike flood risk, subsidence,
or energy infrastructure, aircra
noise barely features in the standard
property transaction process.
There is no mandatory aviation
noise search in conveyancing, no
consistent disclosure requirement
from sellers, and no established
data source that brokers or valuers
routinely check. It is, in effect, a
blind spot.
Crucially, this is not just a concern
for properties at the airport fenceline.
JONO OATES
is co-founder at My Flight Path
Flight paths extend many miles from
airports, and aircra in their climbout or descent phases can generate
significant noise over communities 10,
20 or even 30 miles away.
Many of the worst-affected
properties are in areas where buyers
would never think to ask about
aviation – quiet villages and suburban
estates that happen to sit beneath a
departure or arrival corridor.
It is precisely these locations where
the risk of a client being caught
unaware is greatest.
Why care now?
The parallel with flood risk is
instructive. 20 years ago, flooding was
treated as an aerthought in property
transactions. It took a series of highprofile events, rising insurance costs
and regulatory pressure before the
industry embedded flood risk data
