Crowd sounds off on flight path noise
Fed-up Somerville residents living under narrow flight paths — sometimes hearing roaring planes every 90 seconds — urged officials on Wednesday to support spreading out flights to lessen the noise load on certain neighborhoods around Boston.
“All these neighborhoods are now shouldering the burden of airplane noise,” said Tara Ten Eyck, who lives in West Somerville, under the airtraffic corridor. “It’s really frustrating, and people are tired. The noise is just unfairly distributed across the region.”
The frustrated residents from Somerville, Medford, Cambridge and other communities are now banding together in the hopes of convincing the Federal Aviation Administration to return to the old days with more dispersed flights.
“I would really like to leave right now,” said longtime Somerville resident Susan Berstler, who added she can’t even have a conversation on her porch anymore. “Why am I living in this hellhole?”
The FAA launched new flight paths a few years ago, using state-ofthe-art technology for more direct paths between airports — resulting in more efficient, accurate and safe routes.
This led to a concentration in certain areas, such as Medford and West Somerville.
“The people in West Somerville need to tell their leadership they won’t take this anymore — that they don’t deserve 100% of the noise,” said Peter Houk, the Medford rep on the Massport Community Advisory Committee, a group seeking changes in flight paths. “It’s a step that needs to be taken before officials decide the dispersion idea works for all of the cities, and we can work on this together.”
But Somerville City Councilor Matthew McLaughlin, a member of the Public Health and Public Safety Committee that on Wednesday heard resident testimony on airplane noise, said he’s concerned a proposal could redirect flights over his East Somerville neighborhood.
“We may get an unfair burden put upon us,” McLaughlin said.
In 2016, the FAA and Massport signed a memorandum of understanding to reduce overflight noise impacts from Logan. The FAA/ Massport area navigation study is a first-in-the-nation collaboration between the agencies. They have MIT engineers developing test projects.
One alternative being looked at by MIT to reduce noise is spreading out flights and adjusting aircraft speed.
At Wednesday’s meeting, supporters of “equitable aircraft dispersion” handed out flyers that told attendees to file plane noise complaints on Massport’s website.
“The more unique addresses filing complaints during the MIT Noise Study from now through 2020, the more seriously residents will be taken!” reads the flyer.
More MIT noise data is coming, said state Rep. Denise Provost, but she noted that the FAA does not need to implement any recommendations.
State Rep. Christine Barber added, “We’re waiting on deeper data to make sure if we disperse flights, we’re doing so equitably and not disproportionally harming other communities.”