By Khalida Sarwari and Judy Peterson
Charlie Thomson longs for the quiet days that used to be the hallmark of a city he’s lived in for more than five decades. Lately, peace and quiet seem like a luxury that comes in snippets, interrupted often by the loud whirring sounds of airplanes passing over his Vickery Avenue home Saratoga.
From Palo Alto to Capitola, a growing number of residents have raised the same concerns about air traffic noise. They say the planes flying over their neighborhoods are too low, too loud and too many.
According to the SFO noise abatement office, Saratoga went from reporting no complaints last year to 20 this year, while Los Gatos went up from three to 5,448. The Los Gatos complaints, however, came from just 167 individuals.
Assistant town manager Laurel Prevetti said she wasn’t aware of any complaints coming from Los Gatos residents. “It is entirely possible that there is an increase in airplane complaints that go directly to the Federal Aviation Adminstration,” Prevetti said in an email. “The area at the San Jose-Los Gatos border is receiving more air traffic than prior years.”
Further south, the grassroots organization Save Our Skies Santa Cruz theorizes that the new descent procedures, coupled with the Santa Cruz Mountains’ unique terrain, are amplifying the noise in way the FAA didn’t account for in its environmental assessment.
So the complaints attributed to Los Gatos residents could be coming from people who live in the mountains and who have Los Gatos mailing addresses.
Most of the complaints started after the FAA launched a nationwide plan in March to change flight routes, including at San Francisco International Airport. Dubbed NextGen, short for Next Generation Air Transportation System, the plan is aimed at reducing air traffic congestion by narrowing the corridors for planes flying into and out of airports. Some of the corridors are close to, or directly over, cities such as Santa Cruz and Saratoga, and thus, are responsible for a significant increase in noise, resulting in thousands of unhappy residents.
“Since they’ve started this program, we’re kind of at the crosshairs of these two corridors here,” said Thomson. “There are times when the planes are coming in as often as just a few minutes apart.”
Thomson figures he can’t be the only Saratoga resident who’s spoken out about the issue. He said he didn’t notice the noise until recently, but that’s only because he started to spend more time in his back yard doing carpentry work. The frequency of the planes varies by day, but at times is “incessant,” he said. Some days, he said, he hears them passing every five minutes, sometimes in the middle of the night, loud enough to wake him up.
“There’s a loud whirring sound that’s kind of punctuated,” he said. “You might hear some rumbling in the background. It sounds like a thunderstorm going on.”
Added Thomson, “There are some days where it just drives you nuts.”
Thomson has taken to following the planes on a flight tracker online as well as monitoring the complaints in neighboring cities. He’s also submitted a complaint on the airports’ websites, but suspects they’re backlogged because he’s yet to receive a response.
The home where Thomson and his family have lived since 1961 is about 15 miles from San Jose International Airport and 35 miles from SFO, and yet he said he’s seen planes flying lower than 5,000 feet over his house.
“For instance, yesterday shortly before noon I looked up and I found out later it was one of the new 787 Dreamliners Boeing makes–it’s a large aircraft. If you looked up you’d swear it was 2,000 or 3,000 feet,” said Thomson. “That’s very low [altitude] for a large aircraft [to fly over] a city like our size. And of course, there’s noise associated with it.”
Thomson said he wants the same thing many of the impacted residents in Santa Cruz are asking for: suspend the plan, work out the kinks, and in the meantime, revert to the old plan. He’s also in favor of the FAA holding public hearings and conducting an environmental review of the NextGen plan.
The FAA did hold two private meetings on the issue on July 24. One included Carmel Rep. Sam Farr and the other was attended by Rep. Anna Eshoo, who represents Saratoga, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Lexington Hills.
Eshoo said any fixes would have to take the entire region into account and asked the FAA to develop short- and long-term strategies.
Palo Alto Daily News reporter Jacqueline Lee and Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter Samantha Clark contributed to this story.
