Residents will be officially consulted on the contentious Heathrow Airport expansion plans as a statutory consultation launches next month.

Responses received in the 12-and-a-half-week consultation starting on June 18 will feed into a final planning application for a third runway at the busy airport, Heathrow said.

A spokesman said: “The airport’s June consultation will be its largest and most innovative engage exercise yet. Heathrow has invested in new technology to show the public its current proposals, including a model of the future airport which uses augmented reality, and a sound booth which features virtual reality to demonstrate the effect of noise insulation on properties overflown by aircraft.”

It comes after a legal challenge by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, alongside four other councils, against the controversial third runway was thrown out by judges earlier this month.

The councils had teamed with the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and Greenpeace to get a judicial review of the government’s decision to approve the expansion.

But High Court judges rejected the bid on May 1 – along with a separate bid made by Friends of the Earth and the environmental group Plan B.

Inviting people to participate in the consultation, Emma Gilthorpe, Heathrow’s Executive Director for Expansion, said: “Heathrow’s expansion is a project of huge national and local significance, and it is critical to our country’s economic growth.

“An expanded hub airport will allow the country to access more of the world, create thousands of jobs locally and nationally and it will open up new trading routes.

“But we can’t deliver these plans alone. We urge everyone to have their say in this consultation, to shape our plans, and to help us deliver expansion in the fairest and most sustainable way.”

Commenting on the announcement of the statutory consultation on Heathrow expansion, Paul McGuinness, Chair, No 3rd Runway Coalition said:

“This consultation is about the infrastructure Heathrow will build once they’ve demolished villages in Hillingdon. Not the serious environmental impacts of imposing a further 700 planes a day over the country's most populated region.

“Heathrow’s claim that this consultation, which runs through the summer holiday season, will be their ‘most innovative engagement yet’ sets a low bar.

“Just as their boast to hold events in more locations than ever, acknowledges their failure to consult widely enough in the past.

“They claim ‘transparency’ and that this consultation will include 'consolidated feedback' from the Airspace exercise, earlier in the year. So let them publish it, warts and all.

“Because residents were horrified by their airspace change proposals and incandescent at the loaded, prescribed questions – which far too many felt didn't allow them to express their real views.”

A final proposal will be submitted to the planning inspectorate in 2020, kickstarting an 18-month approvals process.

The decision on whether to grant the DCO will be made by the Secretary of State following a public examination period led by the Planning Inspectorate.