At the New Hyde Park Board of Trustees meeting last Thursday, the board doled out time for the activist group Plane Sense for Long Island to educate village residents on how to protest flights coming into John F. Kennedy Airport that generate noise.
The board welcomed Co-Presidents Elaine Miller and Jana Goldenberg to address town residents on what they could do to combat the ongoing controversy surrounding airplane noise around the south shore of Long Island.
“I want to thank the mayor and the trustees for inviting us to make this presentation,” Miller said.
Goldenberg shared a video of an airplane flying over close to her home, saying “that is my house in Roslyn,” as Miller explained that it is 20 miles out from John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Miller pointed out that in 2012 the Federal Aviation Administration started using a new satellite-based system that caused planes to come in at lower altitudes more frequently, raising the noise volume reaching into homes. Miller believes that the lower altitudes are meant to save fuel.
“The underlying fact is that the noise is very damaging to us. It’s damaging to our health,” Miller said. She explained that stress induced by lack of sleep from flight noise includes health risks, sleep deprivation, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, depression and dizziness.
Miller and Goldenberg recommended the website airnoise.io to residents as a means of filing complaints about airplane noise in the area. When becoming a subscriber, residents will be given a button to press whenever they are disturbed by airplane noise. Goldenerg said that users are also able to file complaints by a text message.
“There is a button that you press, you become a subscriber,” Goldenberg said.
The app is free, Goldenberg said, but as a free subscriber a user is limited to 30 complaints a month. She joked that she and Miller “could file 3,000 in a month. We could click that button all day long”
Goldenberg said a paid subscription costs $5 a month. Complaints from the button go straight to the New York Port Authority, which will email a subscriber saying that complaints have been filed to the nearest airport authority office. The Port Authority oversees John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports.
Miller and Goldenberg said they had attended U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi’s (D-Glen Cove) news conference June 17 when he said the FAA would be adopting a procedure requiring airplanes that fly into Kennedy over areas west of Deer Park to fly no lower than 4,000 feet as soon as June 24.
The FAA said after the conference that it had only begun considering the change and has no date for when any changes may take place.
Goldenberg said at the news conference it was revealed that there would be no change for homes within 15 miles of Kennedy airport. When she asked Suozzi about New Hyde Park, she said the congressman said he would talk with people in his office about the issue.
“I knew it was a crock. And then I heard rumblings yesterday from all my sources that this is not happening,” she said.
Goldenberg said she and Miller have asked Suozzi for paperwork regarding the flight pattern change, but have not received any more information.
“I don’t know who’s lying? Is the FAA lying? Is Suozzi lying?” she said.
In a statement about the date change for the height of flights, Suozzi criticized the FAA. “This is another example of how the broken bureaucracy of the FAA refuses to implement changes that actually help alleviate the air traffic noise problem faced by people on the ground,” he said. “These new procedures did not fix the entire problem, but they would provide some relief from the incessant noise of low-flying planes.”
He went on to say, “the FAA must expedite their review and implement these already agreed-upon procedures immediately.”
The New Hyde Park mayor had a different take on the height of flights.
“I don’t think New Hyde Park would be impacted by raising the altitudes, ” Mayor Lawrence J Montreuil said. New Hyde Park is too close to the “glide slope” for the 4R/22 left runway at Kennedy airport, he said. Airplanes are already at 19,000 feet over New Hyde Park.
“We’re really compounded with the airplanes and the helicopters, so I thank you very much,” Montreuil told Miller and Goldenberg.
