Five Greenpeace volunteers who occupied the top of a British Airways passenger jet were today convicted at Uxbridge magistrates court.

The campaigners pleaded guilty to being in a restricted zone, boarding an aircraft and demonstrating in an airport. They were each given an 18 month conditional discharge and will pay compensation to BA totalling £5,700.

The five hit the headlines across the world in February when they walked through an open door at Terminal 1 and occupied the fuselage of the BA Airbus for two hours, hanging a banner from the tailfin reading: ‘CLIMATE EMERGENCY - NO 3rd RUNWAY'.

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Anna Jones, Sarah Shoraka, Paul Della-Rocca, Frank Hewetson and Jens Loewe were protesting against Labour's plans to build a third runway and sixth terminal at Heathrow. The plane they scaled had just arrived for Manchester - a journey covered by the train in just over two hours - and was refuelling for another domestic flight. The five waited until all the passengers had disembarked before walking through an open door and going ‘airside'.

A widely derided government consultation into Labour's Heathrow proposals was completed the week of the Greenpeace occupation. Ministers are expected to announce a decision on the proposed expansion later this year.

One of the protesters, Anna Jones, said: "Climate change can be beaten, but not by almost doubling the size of the world's biggest international airport. That's why we occupied the top of BA's Manchester to London flight. A huge number of planes leave Heathrow every day destined for cities easily reachable by train. If we invested in high speed rail instead of climate-wrecking runways we could begin to reduce the environmental impact of Heathrow instead of increasing it."

The most popular destination from Heathrow is Paris, with sixty flights back and forth every day. Flights between Heathrow and locations easily accessible by train - such as Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds/Bradford and Durham - total over 100,000 flights a year.

Flying is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, doubling in the 1990s. According to the government, flights from and within the UK account for 13% of the UK's climate impact because greenhouse gases create more global warming when emitted at altitude.

British flyers already create far more carbon emissions per head than those from any other country - nearly 40% higher than the second placed country, Ireland, and more than twice as much as Americans. The Tyndall climate research centre calculates that if aviation expands as projected, Britain will have to totally decarbonise the rest of its economy by 2050 to effectively tackle climate change.

Sarah Shoraka, another of the protesters, said: "The fight against Heathrow expansion is only just beginning. This new runway cannot and will not be built."