|
Dear Friends,
We have three goals for 2025. To advocate with the City to address night time flights over Palo Alto and neighbors; review what is being done with jet noise complaints (SFO, SJC and Nextgen related), and to finalize a framework to track the FAA’s Noise Policy Review.
Please see the Legal Test - the first of five topics to evaluate FAA noise policy; legal considerations; public expectations; scientific validity; GAO's recommendations to improve engagement with communities, and transparency.
The FAA’s Noise Policy Review is on the program at the upcoming UC Davis Noise & Emissions Symposium. The FAA will update on the Airport Noise Advisory Committee (ANAC), announced last year to “advise the FAA on issues facing the aviation community that are related to aircraft noise exposure and existing FAA noise policies and regulations;” and also on the FAA’s “research on community response, featuring findings from the Neighborhood Environmental Survey.”
For some background, the FAA’s Neighborhood Environmental Survey (NES) that informs FAA noise assumptions was launched in 2015 thanks to YOU. The survey and plan to update noise policy was shelved for years but revived in October 2015 as a result of public outcry over Nextgen flight path noise, including complaints from newly impacted areas, lawsuits, citizen studies, and congressional complaints. FAA senior leadership acknowledged they needed to review their noise assumptions at our meeting in Palo Alto in July 2015 and later that year also initiated work with our officials on the Select Committee. The NES survey of 10,000 residents near 20 representative airports was completed in 2016 but it still took five years, more citizen advocacy, and finally an act of congress for the FAA to reveal the results. When the NES was published in 2021, confirming that the FAA's historical assumptions about noise were inaccurate/off-base, the FAA issued a Request for Input on Research Activities. The overwhelming response from 4,159 public comments was “no more research,” with calls for urgent change to the policy. In 2023, the FAA conducted a Request for input for policy review; the most recent step is the Airport Noise Advisory Committee.
FAA deserves credit for acknowledging and responding to public outcry, conducting the NES, and excellent public outreach in 2021 and 2023. At the same time, the multi-year delays in producing a new policy - which we attribute to aviation industry stakeholders and Congress resisting responsibility for aviation noise - are a big problem. Airlines for America and Airports Council International responded to the NES effectively by asking for more research, and airports asked that no changes should be made to how the FAA conducts environmental disclosures. In spite of FAA and industry talk about “shared responsibility” and “working together” air travel related taxes and related airport grants disincentivize addressing noise. We need to address these issues for a more reasonable new noise policy.
| 
