WITH regard to the proposed airport extension at Halfpenny Green, once again we appear to be dealing with a case of bureaucracy gone mad.

Or is this a sinister attempt to take another chunk of exceptionally good green belt and turn it into part of the West Midlands conurbation?

Let us take the kindly view that some chair-bound planner, probably based in London, has been told to turn the little 1940s RAF flight training school into yet another vast airfield, allegedly to carry vast numbers of potential tourists and, presumably, vast quantities of produce into the centre of England.

This airfield is so small that the largest wartime plane it could cope with was an Avro Anson, a small twin-engined trainer, about half the size of a modern inter-city flight plane.

So we now need to extend Halfpenny Green over miles of beautiful open countryside.

Of course, once we have built this we will find all of the roads accessing it are country lanes.

Never mind, we need an excuse for resuscitating the orbital road scheme round the west side of Wolverhampton, which has already been roundly condemned by all of the local communities.

The nearest "A" road, three miles as the crow flies to Halfpenny Green, is the Wolverhampton to Bridgnorth road, and this is not even a dual carriageway.

The nearest motorway, the M54, is nine and a half miles away and you have to use a veritable spider's web of lanes to get to it.

Another problem is that the landing run-in would be over beautiful areas such as Kinver Edge, Hampton Valley and Highgate Common - all very popular spots for getting a bit of peace and quiet.

The holding zone, with aircraft circling low overhead, would apparently be in the Kidderminster, Bewdley, Kingsford area - the latter two again being quiet beauty spots.

The first Labour government, after the war, famously created the green belt system to prevent, we hoped for all time, the drowning of beautiful rural areas by indiscriminate development.

Antics like putting a large airport at Halfpenny Green are totally at odds with this concept and we can only hope this present Labour government will firmly refuse to allow such a massacre.

If this development did take place the creeping cancer of further loss of green belt to speculative housing, all round it, would surely follow.

PETER ROSE

Buckeridge

Far Forest