Fly Friendly – Or Not

[/media-credit] Private planes parked at the Jernstedt Airfield.

By Valerie Brown, Dec. 15, 2015. Some people love airplanes’ sleek lines, the percussive slap and chatter of helicopter rotor blades, the roar and shimmering heat emitted by turbines, and even the smells of oxidizing hydrocarbons.

Other people hate those same things. American aviation regulations ostensibly balance the values and needs of both kinds of view, but it is an uneasy–some say severely biased–truce.

Most concerns about aviation noise and air pollution focus on big jets and big airports. For example, residents near England’s Heathrow Airport and Chicago’s O’Hare Airport have struggled for decades with the noise and toxic emissions from commercial aviation. Currently, the city of Phoenix, Arizona is suing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a change in required flight patterns at the city’s Sky Harbor International Airport sharply increased noise levels in residential areas.

But there are also millions of people living near the approximately 20,000 small airports used by piston-engine planes and helicopters as well as small jets – the types of flying machines called ‘general aviation’ (GA). This is what Gorge residents and visitors are most likely to encounter. GA aircraft are used for a variety of tasks including firefighting, search and rescue, vintage plane fly-ins, agricultural pesticide spraying, corporate transportation, recreational flying, and scenic tours.

There are two GA airports that serve the Gorge: Ken Jernstedt Airfield, owned by the Port of Hood River, and the Columbia Gorge Regional/The Dalles Municipal Airport in Dallesport, owned jointly by the City of The Dalles and Klickitat County (Washington). Neither airport is considered particularly busy compared to other GA airports. The Hillsboro Airport sees almost 700 operations (takeoffs and landings) a day, while Jernstedt Airfield sees about 39; Columbia Regional, 45. Neither airport has a control tower or radar equipment because activity at both airports is low and the depth of the Gorge presents technical problems for radar. There’s currently no commercial air service in the Gorge.

All of this means, it’s a matter of whether a pilot decides to consider the effects of the engine noise on people on the ground. If a pilot decides not to, there’s no authority nearby to hold the pilot accountable. Hikers, picnickers, and people relaxing outside run the risk of aviation noise shattering their enjoyment.

[/media-credit] An pilot practices “touch and go’s” during a clear break in weather.

Tod Guenther, son of former Hood River city manager Lynn Guenther, has experienced plenty of aviation noise, having grown up on airbases while his father was in the Air Force. Yet Tod finds himself annoyed with local air traffic.

“It wouldn’t bother me too much if they were a little bit higher or you just see them one time,” Guenther says. “But it’s been constant over the last few years. You notice it on the weekends when you’re trying to relax.”

Guenther has never contacted the airport to complain, but others have. “We do occasionally get noise complaints,” says Scott Gifford, president of Classic Wings, Jernstedt Airfield’s fixed-base operator. “Some can be directly attributed to, basically, pilots being stupid,” he says. Some pilots are “inconsiderate to the neighbors,” failing to climb to a reasonable altitude before flying over residential areas, he says.

Probably the most annoying type of general aviation in terms of noise is flight training. People bothered by aircraft noise often say that one flyover by a loud plane or helicopter is one thing, but circling or repetitive landing and taking off (known as ‘touch and go’s’ in the business) wears on their nerves. Yet these are the very activities student pilots have to practice. But as long as small airports have small flight schools or none at all, this kind of noise can remain negligible. However, non-student pilots also often do repetitive touch-and-go’s to keep up their license requirements.

Noise: More than Annoying

Noise is defined as unwanted sound. Most noise regulations, aviation’s included, rely on decibel levels alone. But loudness doesn’t capture the full effect. Being disturbed by noise is more than simple annoyance. Even noises as low as about 45 db (decibels) can raise heart rate and blood pressure.  This in turn disrupts cardiovascular rhythms, raises stress hormone levels, and can lead to atherosclerosis. One study found that aircraft noise as low as 33 db was enough to raise stress hormones in sleeping subjects. For comparison, bird calls are around 40 db. Chronic exposures to levels of about 70 db–the level of noise from a vacuum cleaner–can cause direct damage to hearing. A propeller plane flying overhead at 1000 feet has been estimated at 88 db–about like a leaf blower from 50 feet away. Children in noisy environments have trouble concentrating and understanding what they read.

Heavy Metal

In addition to noise, small planes and helicopters emit one of the most toxic substances known to man: lead. Lead was banned from paint in 1976 and phased out of gasoline by 1995, but most general aviation aircraft were exempted then and remain so today. The justification is that the engines in these small aircraft will not work correctly on unleaded fuel, creating a safety hazard. The claim is not universally accepted.

[/media-credit] An on-site fuel tank at the Jernstedt Airfield.

General aviation is now the single largest source of lead in the atmosphere, responsible for nearly 500 tons emitted annually in the U.S. The Hillsboro airport is the largest source of atmospheric lead in Oregon, releasing nearly a ton a year. It is also the busiest airport in the state (topping even Portland International), principally owing to the thousands of flights engendered by student pilots at Hillsboro Aero Academy.

There is little information about lead levels in soils and air around most GA airports, because in most cases nobody has looked for it. But one study estimated that there are 16 million Americans living within one kilometer of a GA airport, and three million children attending school within that radius. Other research has shown that people living and/or working that close to a GA airport have elevated blood lead levels which, although seldom above the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) current ‘action level’ of 10 micrograms per deciliter, are often within the range shown to harm children’s health.

It is generally agreed that there is no safe level of lead in the body. Lead is a neurotoxicant and reproductive hormone disruptor. Prenatal exposure can result in premature birth, low birth weight, decreased mental ability, reduced growth, abnormalities in eye development, and higher risk of obesity later in life. At the lowest concentrations in children it can shave off significant IQ points.

The EPA has made some halfhearted moves to get the FAA to impose alternatives to leaded fuels, but its inertia has lasted so long that Friends of the Earth and Earthjustice sued the EPA in 2011. In 2014 the same groups along with Oregon Aviation Watch, an activist group based in Hillsboro, petitioned the EPA to make an immediate endangerment finding that lead is a hazard to public health. The agency denied the petition. At the moment the EPA claims it will issue a draft endangerment ruling in 2017, so the delay continues.

Who You Gonna Call? Nobody.

Aside from calling the local airport, what options do residents have who are bothered by aviation noise or concerned about pollution? In principle there are some avenues for people to be heard, but unfortunately most are ineffective. Pinning specific lead emissions and egregious noise events to particular aircraft is very difficult. It’s well known that flight instructors like to have their students fly to outlying airports where they can practice landing, taking off, and interacting with the control tower (if there is one) in a relatively uncongested environment. The itinerant nature of much GA air traffic makes it difficult to identify offending pilots. Many aircraft are not even landing at an airport, just passing through. And in any case, complaints are always after the fact.

Contacting the FAA will not get results. The FAA treats most noise as a ‘nuisance’ rather than a ‘hazard.’ Getting the agency to act on noise complaints means convincing it that there is actual danger associated with the noise, such as a pilot buzzing people on the ground and running the risk of hitting a tree or otherwise losing control. In other words, the FAA washes its hands of the problem, stating that “Airports are responsible for their noise impact on the communities they occupy.” But this represents one of the deepest ironies of GA’s environmental problems: Airport owners can control only the airport facilities, including terminals, runways, hangars, and other real estate. The airspace of all non-military airports is controlled by the FAA. Since most noise offenses and toxic emissions originate in airspace, there is the Catch-22.

[/media-credit] A plane takes off from the runway.

The EPA has a noise pollution section, but Ronald Reagan ordered it to become inactive in 1981 and funding evaporated. The Quiet Communities Act of 2015 introduced in the House on October 2 by Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) would reawaken the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control and authorize $21 million per year through 2025 to fund it. Its chances of becoming law are unknown.

Things are no better at the state level. “Currently,” says Oregon Aviation Watch’s Miki Barnes, “there is no avenue through the Oregon Department of Aviation to file noise complaints.” Even though Oregon has strong noise control regulations, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality de-activated its noise section at the same time as the EPA in the 1980s.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), which is the most influential GA political group, has established a ‘Fly Friendly’ campaign to encourage general aviation pilots to consider the effects of the noise they generate on people who may not be enthusiastic about the ‘romance of aviation.’ The trouble is that flying friendly is entirely voluntary, although the AOPA has also produced a sensible guide for pilots to avoid the worst sorts of clashes with disgruntled citizens.

For the time being, neither Gorge airport is experiencing dramatic expansion. Gifford expects that itinerant flights will be the main growth sector at the Hood River airport. He believes this may include aviation tourism. There is no chance that commercial service will come to Hood River because of the city’s proximity to Portland International, and most agricultural spraying jobs have been replaced by ground application of pesticides, Gifford says. Corporate and business small plane and jet traffic could increase as the local economy expands. Some of the existing traffic, he adds, is students from flight schools in the Willamette Valley, including Hillsboro, and from the Bend-Redmond area.

Because Jernstedt Airfield is south of the city outside the urban growth boundary, Gifford doesn’t expect to see problems that arise for many airports from encroaching residential development. Most of the land surrounding the airport is orchards zoned as exclusive farmland, which makes it unlikely to be re-zoned for housing. This is good because, he says, “The trees don’t complain.”