It brought HAECO quite a lot of troubles after Richland Gardens admitted residence, because many people complained about the noise at night. But then HAECO had been there for decades and those who complained were moving in just recently!  Several of our night works made noise: firstly it came rather loud when the aircrafts activated auxiliary power unit to generate electricity; secondly, if any plane that had undergone engine maintenance was to take off at 8:00am, we had to test the engine at 6:00am, and it was really ear-splitting. No planes of this sort could take off before we did the engine test. The engineer in charge was actually pitiable, because the police would come to note down his ID card number if anyone filed a complain during the engine test. I guess the airport police came straight to the plane for the engineer. Of course the Richland residents wouldn’t feel good to be waken up at night, but HAECO had been operating like this for decades in there, and the government couldn’t give us other engine test site. There was no solution for this!

When someone called the police they had to do the investigation. They would put questions to the night duty supervisor and record everything.

The first victim was actually Choi Hung Estate. Those living on the Diamond Hill farmland and squatter area didn’t grumble at all. We installed an air deflector system for engine testing so that the air current flowed upwards but not towards the street. However, even after that it struck and killed a police. He was a sergeant, riding bicycle to keep night watch. He was ignorant of the power of air current, which pushed him down the cycle and struck him dead.

At night, we left the engine combusting without propulsion. There was a large deflector to direct the air current aside from Choi Hung Estate. First we called the control tower to inform them about the location of our engine test. There we had to leave the engine idle — we were allowed to test the propulsion only after 6:00am.