Under a holding stack
Living or working under a holding stack
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, ATC keeps these planes in a circling pattern until they can land: this is called a ‘holding stack’.
The holding stack’s minimum height is 7,000 ft above sea level. 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, Gatwick has two – Willo and Timba.
