Silence Is Golden

After a decade of turning a deaf ear to the problem of airplane flights in Grand Canyon, the National Park Service now has bucked, bumbled and booted the issue to the Federal Aviation Administration. Assistant Interior Secretary William P. Horn protested Monday that the Interior Department is not an air-safety agency. Rather, Horn said, the FAA should be the one to decide if 50,000 flights a year over, in and through the canyon pose a flying hazard.

But that is not the point. Interior’s passing of the buck ignores the fact that Grand Canyon is the one park specifically directed by Congress to act against tourist flights if they are having a “significant adverse impact on the natural quiet and experience of the park.”

After prodding and lawsuits, Interior studied the noise problem in Grand Canyon the past two years. The testimony has been overwhelming: The constant flights of planes and helicopters have indeed caused a significant adverse impact on the natural quiet and experience of the park. Among those calling for strong action was Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, who compared the Grand Canyon cacophony to rush hour in downtown Phoenix.

The Interior Department has the authority to control such flights on the basis of a noise nuisance alone, and should have done so long ago. Instead, Interior suggested Monday that the FAA ban flights in the lower third of the canyon’s inner gorge, consider installation of radar to monitor flights, and study the noise problem for two more years. Even from a safety standpoint the Interior proposal is lacking. The inner-gorge ban, for instance, would not have prevented last June’s collision of a twin-engine Otter and a helicopter, which killed 25 tourists and crew members. The accident occurred just a few hundred feet below the canyon rim and more than a mile above the Colorado River bed.

Air tours pose a significant environmental problem not just at Grand Canyon but also increasingly throughout the park system. And screaming military jets constantly shatter the wilderness experience in places like Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks in California.

The House of Representatives realized last year that there was no excuse for further delay, and so it passed legislation that was sponsored by Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced) to ban all flights below the rim of the Grand Canyon and over sensitive areas of other national parks, including Yosemite. The Interior Department’s decision on Monday to do nothing makes it even more imperative now that Congress revive the Coelho bill and send it to the President.

Then the day may come again when this sort of dialogue can take place in America’s parkland wilderness:

“Listen!”

“What do you hear?”

“Nothing.”