Mr. Evan Cullen:

The significance of it is that it is always preferred that aircraft takes off with a headwind. That is why runways are oriented, as far as possible, in the direction of the prevailing winds. What is very detrimental to the safety of an aircraft is landing or taking off with a tailwind. What one normally does is take off into a headwind and when established in-flight, the aircraft then turns to where it wants to go. The orientation of Dublin Airport is that the main runways are east-west. It is commercially efficient to use the westerly runway as much as possible so that aircraft can take off out to the west and then turn, normally north, to head east into Europe or to head west for the United States. When the wind, however, is blowing from the east this gives rise to a tailwind on the main westerly runway and the discussion is at what level of tolerance we are going to take the tailwind to. The aircraft are certified to a 10 knot tailwind but the difficulty is that there is no such thing as a perfect 10 knot tailwind. ICAO, on a safety basis, recommends that when the tailwind is at 5 knots, aircraft should then change runways. We wanted that policy implemented at Dublin Airport and there was resistance to it because of the commercial impact of that. We were then excluded from the runway safety team. That is the name on the team - the runway safety team. It is not the runway commercial team.