‘Eternal Silence’ Is No More : Aircraft Noise Shatters Our Great Parks and Our Aloneness

In 1906 novelist Zane Grey wrote of the Grand Canyon, “One feature of this ever changing spectacle never changes--its eternal silence.” Unfortunately, an event that took place at Kitty Hawk, N.C., three years earlier had already marked the beginning of the end for the canyon’s “eternal silence.”

The first sightseeing flights over the Grand Canyon took place in the mid-1920s over the heated objection of the director of the National Park Service, Horace Albright. Since then the noise of the planes has been getting louder each year, and the objections of the Park Service more muted.

The situation at present is intolerable.

As early as 1978 the Park Service reported that in some places it was possible to hear a small plane or helicopter during 95% of daylight hours. Since then this winged traffic has increased about 500%.

As the number of flights soared to about 600 per day at the peak season, the Park Service was caught in a squeeze. Hikers, rafters and other visitors without aircraft were growing more and more adamant that something be done. But commercial operators--not subject to Park Service regulations, since they don’t touch down inside the park--argued forcefully that it was their right to run these flights for the pleasure of customers who otherwise could not enjoy this natural wonder.

There is a problem of jurisdiction hovering over this situation. The law that expanded Grand Canyon National Park in 1975 expressly ordered that “whenever the (interior) secretary has reason to believe that aircraft or helicopter activity . . . is having significant adverse impact on the natural quiet and experience of the park” he shall consult and recommend and then finally take action to correct the problem.

There can be no dispute that the natural quiet of the Arizona park is all but gone during daylight hours, but the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t give a hoot about the racket in the canyon, and it claims jurisdiction over the canyon’s airspace. The Park Service and the interior secretary have chosen not to challenge the FAA.

Grand Canyon, where helicopters have knocked endangered peregrine falcons from their nests and scattered herds of rare bighorn sheep, may be the place where the cacophony is worst, but it is by no means the only place with the problem.

Choppers are buzzing rare grizzly bears inside Montana’s Glacier National Park, with unknown but worrisome consequences. Aircraft have caused the crumbling of priceless Anasazi Indian ruins at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park. Tourist planes and helicopters have destroyed natural features in Wyoming’s Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

Even the military is contributing to the clangor, with training jets screaming at high speed and low altitudes through Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, Zion and other parks to the consternation of hikers and wildlife.

The problems caused by noise in our national parks represent the antithesis of what these areas are supposed to be: natural preserves first, compatible recreation second. No one ever said that our parks and their visitors had to tolerate intrusive, unregulated aircraft.

Operators of Grand Canyon overflights tried at a recent hearing in Flagstaff, Ariz., to use the handicapped to gain favor, claiming that flying was the only way in which disabled people could enjoy the canyon. The operators’ bluff was called by a quadriplegic who had been refused permission to fly on a tour of the canyon because of her disability. She was able to join a float trip through the canyon, which she characterized as the experience of a lifetime.

After years of effort to resolve the problem, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society filed suit May 12 in U.S. District Court in Phoenix against the Park Service and others to compel action to regulate overflights. The outcome of the case is in doubt, and Congress eventually may be called on to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, Cessnas swoop through narrow canyons and choppers hover a scant 50 feet above ancient ruins and muted waterfalls, shattering the natural stillness. We can only wonder, with the great naturalist of the Southwest, Joseph Wood Krutch, “How long will it be before . . . there is no quietness anywhere, no escape from the rumble and the crash, the clank and the screech . . . ? Perhaps when the time comes that there is no more silence and no more aloneness, there will also be no longer anyone who wants to be alone.”