Town moves to silence plane noise
Annoyed by pilots who ignore a voluntary overnight flight curfew at neighboring Westchester County Airport, Greenwich officials said yesterday that they will seek a mandatory grounding of planes from midnight to 6:30 a.m.
In a series of announcements related to aircraft noise, the town also said it will hire a consultant to study a federal proposal to reroute planes over the area.
'Our area is getting hammered, in my opinion, by overflights from Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark,' said Erica Purnell, vice chairman of the Selectmen's Advisory Committee on Aircraft Noise.
The town recently formed the committee to come to terms with a quality of life issue that officials said was not being properly addressed at the local level.
Four of the committee's 18 members are current or former pilots, including chairman Bruce Dixon, who said he hopes to form a working group with his fellow aviators to discuss adherence to existing aircraft routes with air traffic controllers at Westchester County Airport.
Current flight patterns call for aircraft approaching the Rye Brook airport to begin their descent over Long Island Sound, a procedure that town officials say is often ignored to save fuel and diverts planes over Greenwich.
'You probably heard the phrase cutting the corner,' Dixon said during a news conference at Town Hall.
Another area of concern are breaches of the voluntary overnight curfew at the airport. Flights betwen midnight and 6:30 a.m. averaged about 13 per night in 2006, up from about 10.8 per night in 2005, according to the airport's noise abatement office.
Arlene Murray, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the agency has a process for handling mandatory curfew requests.
'They would have to show the FAA that they are not impacting interstate commerce and also that they would not unduly impacting the aviation industry,' said Murray, who noted that no other airports in the region have a mandatory curfew.
A mandatory curfew would not be new, as the airport had one that was challenged by the FAA and thrown out by the courts in the early 1980s and replaced with a voluntary one. In April 2001, the county closed the airport's parking garage from 12:30 a.m. to 5:50 a.m. to discourage travelers from taking flights that violated the voluntary curfew. Federal regulations forced the county to reopen the garage overnight after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however.Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., pledged his support for the town's effort.
Full Story: Norwalk Advocate
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