LUC has recently completed a Tranquillity and Visual Intrusion Assessment as part of the Edinburgh Airport Airspace Change Programme application to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

The CAA Guidance on the airspace change process highlights the importance of tranquillity and visual intrusion, but does not offer any recommendations. We therefore developed a bespoke approach to assessing the baseline tranquillity of the area around Edinburgh Airport. The approach was broadly based on previous relevant work, including by CPRE and Scottish Natural Heritage, and drew on LUC’s experience in the field.

The work was undertaken by our Landscape Planning and GIS teams based at our Edinburgh office, who have worked on a number of landscape and planning related projects in the area and therefore have excellent knowledge of the landscape of the Central Belt.

The assessment allowed us to calculate the relative tranquillity across the project area based on the number of positive indicators (e.g. visibility of woodland or sea, naturalness of the area) and number of visual intrusions (e.g. visibility of the airport, motorway, railway). It also flagged up areas which are currently not affected by any visual intrusions. An interesting aspect of the approach is that it was wholly based on open source data. The report is available online (Appendix B).

This work builds on LUC’s previous involvement in tranquillity and intrusion mapping undertaken for CPRE in England and Wales.