Living under a holding stack

Living or working under a holding stack, you hear planes waiting to come in to land

When airports are very busy there can be a build-up of planes waiting to land.

To make sure there is a safe gap between each plane landing, Air Traffic Control keeps these planes in a circling pattern until they can land: this is called a ‘holding stack’. The holding stack’s minimum height starts at 7,000ft, so the planes are all still high up. This height means that the noise from the holding stack should not cause a nuisance.

Of course, this can’t always be the case, and people are sometimes disturbed. This happens more often when a holding stack is over the countryside, where there is little background noise, such as road traffic.

Every airport has several holding stacks, and Heathrow has four – Bovingdon, Lambourne, Ockham and Biggin. Please see diagram below illustrating how a stack works.