An aircraft noise study of the area surrounding John F. Kennedy Airrport has been underway for about a year, but to New Hyde Park officials, it’s missing a key component.
For several months, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has measured noise from airplanes and helicopters that start or end their trips at JFK or one of New York City’s three other metropolitan airports.
But the state-mandated study deletes readings from any aircraft that don’t take off or land at an airport — including most of the low-flying helicopters that have inundated New Hyde Park, Floral Park, Mineola and the Willistons with noise for the past several years.
“(T)he helicopters and the jets going into Kennedy have such a combined effect I think we naturally assumed that everything is being taken into consideration,” said Lawrence Montreuil, New Hyde Park’s deputy mayor.
These helicopters that start elsewhere in the city and fly out to central and eastern Long Island compound the area’s aircraft noise problem, Montreuil said.
Those villages sit along the flight path for airplanes approaching JFK runways 22L and 22R, the airport’s two main landing strips, so they are impacted by noise from these low-flying jets.
Because helicopters have to be separated from planes by at least 1,000 feet, they are only 500 to 800 feet above New Hyde Park and other villages that lie on their air route along the Long Island Railroad tracks, adding to the noise.
Montreuil said he learned the Port Authority’s noise study, ordered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in March 2014 and started last November, doesn’t keep noise records from these helicopters at an Oct. 29 public workshop.
There, he told Port Authority representatives the village thinks it should keep the records because the location of JFK’s landing strips cause their low flight paths, he said. The village also plans to send the Port Authority a letter making that argument.
“They were very persuaded, I would say, by my argument to keep it and that it does in fact have to be entered in because the airport does in fact cause the noise,” Montreuil said.
A Port Authority spokesperson deferred to the Federal Aviation Administration on issues relating to helicopter noise.
The noise study came as a result of efforts by state lawmakers and a Hempstead-based noise abatement committee to get the Port Authority and federal officials to mitigate aircraft noise in Nassau County, Queens and other areas near New York’s JFK and LaGuardia Airports and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty and Teterboro Airports.
Larry Quinn, Garden City’s representative on the noise abatement committee, said it would be helpful to have the noise measurements from the transient helicopters. But the Port Authority’s sensors are placed about a mile from the helicopter route, he said, meaning they miss a lot more noise altogether.
“Ostensibly those noise monitors were set up to monitor noise entering or leaving JFK or LaGuardia, so they don’t want to have other noises compounding the issue, whereas someone on the ground, it doesn’t make a difference to us where the plane or helicopter came from,” Quinn said. “We’re just being annoyed by the noise.”
The Port Authority doubled the amount of noise monitors it owns to conduct the study.
Quinn said he would favor a separate study to get a fuller picture of the helicopter noise, but added that it’s uncertain who would fund one.
