New flight path

Activists make noise about new flight paths
12/18/01
By Amy Westfeldt
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Saying the move could shave seven minutes off flight times, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday it would switch the northbound flight routes of planes landing at Newark International Airport and at LaGuardia.

A citizens' group said it is considering a court challenge to the decision to switch hundreds of planes' flight paths by Dec. 27 because the routes might reallocate air noise across central and southern New Jersey.

"People who didn't have noise are going to get noise and people who did get noise are going to get relief," said Michael Schatzki, a member of NJ Citizens Against Aircraft Noise.

FAA spokesman Jim Peters said the change was needed to shorten flight times at two airports with some of the country's longest flight delays, and to create more direct routes that would make air traffic controllers' jobs easier.

The FAA said it had concluded through computer modeling that air noise wouldn't increase for any affected residents.

The agency's Eastern Region is in the middle of a comprehensive airspace redesign study, but Peters said the agency was entitled to make this switch without doing a complete environmental study because it involved airspace under 3,000 feet.

The change was "categorically excluded" because it would not trigger any extraordinary circumstances as defined by the FAA, Peters said.

Schatzki disagreed, saying the FAA could make such a change only if the issue is not likely to cause great public controversy.

"Certainly the airspace over New Jersey and noise over New Jersey has been a huge public controversy since 1987," Schatzki said. "To claim that this is a categorical exclusion is ludicrous."

Schatzki said the group's attorney was reviewing the FAA's plan and said he wouldn't rule out a court challenge to stop the switch of flight routes.

Currently, planes flying from the south to LaGuardia take what's known as the Yardley route, through Yardley, Pa., and across New Jersey to land from the south. Planes flying to Newark take the Robbinsville route, through Robbinsville, N.J. The flight paths currently cross each other west of Raritan Bay.

Under the new plan, LaGuardia-bound planes would take the Robbinsville route straight to the airport, passing through parts of Monmouth County that weren't on previous routes. Newark-bound planes would go through Yardley into New Jersey, crossing different central New Jersey towns to go east.

Peters didn't know exactly how many flights were affected, but said that before airline flight business decreased on Sept. 11, about 750 flights landed at Newark and about 700 flights landed at LaGuardia each day. Only a percentage of those flights land from the south, he said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------