"I was moving to a quiet outskirt of the city surrounded by nature — an ideal place to live," he says.

Today, Holub and most of the other 3,000 residents of the upscale neighborhood are afraid that their paradise could soon turn into a hell.

The Prague City Council approved Sept. 14 a plan to add a third runway to the nearby Ruzyně Airport extending 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) toward the city and costing as much as 7 billion Kč ($310 million).

The new runway would end only a few kilometers from Holub's front door. He and his neighbors say that the expansion would make their lives unbearable, and they are fighting it in court.

"We won't let this go easily," Nebušice Mayor Jaroslav Černý says. "We'll be filing other lawsuits and doing anything and everything to prevent the runway from being built."

Delaying strategy

In July, the Supreme Administrative Court rejected the original go-ahead issued by the City Council last year.

The court said that the council had not considered the environmental impact of the expansion or the protests of Nebušice residents, who, together with residents of nearby Přední Kopanina, overwhelmingly shot down the expansion in a 2004 referendum.

Prague Deputy Mayor Jan Bürgermeister told The Prague Post that the City Council made "formal adjustments" to its original proposal, but he avoided commenting on the outcry from residents who would be directly affected by the new runway.

"We incorporated in our new statement an assessment of the impact on the environment and some other details and gave consent to the construction of the third runway," he says. "In fact, it's the city's priority to speed up the construction."

Jaromír Beránek, an analyst with the tourism-monitoring company Mag Consulting, says building a new runway is crucial to the state government because it intends to privatize the airport as soon as possible.

"A third runway would significantly increase the government's profit from the airport's sale," Beránek says.

If things go according to plan, the runway should be built by 2009, airport spokeswoman Veronika Sedláčková says.

Nebušice residents promise a tough battle.

Holub, who works as chairman of the Civic Association for Nebušice, says residents are ready to appeal to all levels of courts, including the Constitutional Court.

"And we're not afraid of taking the matter to international courts if necessary," he says.

Holub admits that he has his doubts about whether the association can bring the project to a halt.

"Still," he says, "we can at least bring about a five-to-10-year delay to the runway's construction."

Flying beyond limits

Opening a new runway is essential for handle the increasing traffic through Ruzyně Airport.

The airport is in the midst of the busiest period in its history. Last year, the airport had a record 10.8 million passengers pass through its gates, an 11 percent increase on the year before. Its profits in 2005 reached almost 1.5 billion Kč.

Over the first seven months of this year, 6.4 million passengers passed through, a 5.8 percent increase over the same period last year. The overall turnout should reach 11.5 million passengers this year, Sedláčková says.

The overflow frequently pushes airport traffic beyond its operational limits. The aiport is only allowed 40 takeoffs or landings per hour, but it often needs to deal with even more traffic. In late June, Ruzyně accommodated a record number of 50 takeoffs and landings in one hour.

Sedláčková says this was only possible due to quality air-traffic controllers.

The window factor

With a new runway, Ruzyně Airport would try to clear as many as 20 million passengers annually within the next 13 years, Sedláčková says.

Such a prospect is horrific to Holub and his neighbors.

"The level of noise around our houses would increase 100 percent," Holub says. "It would worsen the living conditions of about a quarter of Prague residents."

Sedláčková says the construction of the new runway would help ease air traffic above central Prague so that, while noise in northwest Prague would increase, it would actually decrease in southwest Prague, where nearly 150,000 people live.

She says new policies have reduced airplane noise about 2 decibels since 1990, despite the major increase of air traffic.

Aside from banning loud, older aircraft from landing in Prague, Ruzyně charges noise fees from airlines according to the level of noise aircraft make.