St Tropez residents declare war on jet-set helicopters...

Jean-Claude Molho and his wife, Martine, have no need for an alarm clock. Their wake-up call comes almost every day at about 7.30am, when, out of the hills of Font Mourier, a helicopter thunders over their whitewashed villa and makes sleep an impossibility.

It is not the peace and quiet they expected from their retirement, and they are not happy. Along with thousands of other locals, they have begun to mobilise against the celebrities, businessmen and formula one racing drivers who treat private helicopters as a taxi service and have turned the airspace above St Tropez into one of the busiest in Europe. 

"It's hellish. They come over every five minutes," Molho said, his lavish grey eyebrows arching as rotor blades droned into earshot over his patio. "It starts in April and goes on until the end of August. At night you have to close all the windows and shutters because it starts when you're still in bed."

Things have got so bad that Molho, president of the pressure group Halte Hélico, handed in a petition this month to local authorities complaining that not enough was being done to protect long-term residents from the summertime pollution of a noisy minority. More than 4,000 people signed it, warning that if no action were taken by August 1, they would block the nearest official landing site, at Grimaud, and stop its well-heeled clientele from boarding their flights. More...

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