Residents Make More Noise Despite Quieter Jets Using John Wayne

When a group of politicians met in a Newport Beach park last May to discuss pollution in Upper Newport Bay, they soon became preoccupied by another environmental problem: noise from older jetliners streaking overhead from John Wayne Airport, which left them unable to hear themselves speak.

“I saw that when the new-generation (quieter) aircraft came over we could continue to speak,” recalled county Supervisor Thomas F. Riley. “I remember thinking that this is an improvement. At least we’re making progress.”

Benjamin W. Heath agreed with Riley’s assessment. Heath is a member of an Eastbluff neighborhood association whose members live in an area bounded by Jamboree Road on the east, Upper Newport Bay on the west, Back Bay Drive on the north and Amigos Way on the south. They are a major source of complaints called into John Wayne Airport’s Noise Abatement Center.

“I believe that there has been a slight improvement,” Heath said in an interview last week.

Yet while noise from aircraft using John Wayne has declined in recent years, the number of noise complaints has risen annually since 1982--and county airport officials aren’t sure why.

“There’s not a clear pattern to the complaints,” said Christine Edwards, the airport’s noise abatement officer. “A lot depends on whether the airport has been in the news lately.”

According to Edwards’ quarterly noise reports, the aggregate daily noise levels have inched downward at all nine monitoring stations in neighborhoods around the airport, despite a big increase in commercial jet traffic.

The reports attribute the decline in noise levels to the airlines’ gradual shift to newer, quieter jets, such as the British-built BAe-146 and the Boeing 737-300. The airport’s two biggest clients, AirCal and PSA, have been phasing in these quieter aircraft.

But the complaints, Edwards said, “seem to have a life all their own.”

For example, the average daily noise readings have dropped in Heath’s Eastbluff neighborhood from a Community Noise Equivalent Level (CNEL) of 55.7 during the third quarter of 1983 to 53.1 during the same quarter this year, while the average number of daily jet operations increased from 108 to 196. (CNEL is the average cumulative amount of sound energy to which a person is exposed in a 24-hour period, expressed in decibels.)

Meanwhile, the number of noise complaints filed by Eastbluff residents rose sharply from 24 during the third quarter of 1983 to 52 for the same quarter this year, and similar increases have occurred in other Newport Beach communities.

One explanation, officials said, is that the average number of daily jet operations has nearly doubled. Some Newport Beach residents, they said, may be more sensitive to the frequency of jets roaring overhead than they are to their relative loudness. This point was stressed by many Newport Beach residents who opposed last year’s out-of-court settlement of an airport noise lawsuit in which the city agreed to accept more flights in exchange for a cap on the airport’s annual passenger-handling capacity.

Two Major Factors

But besides the increased number of flights, airport politics and residents’ involvement in airport issues also are factors, said Mark Petracca, assistant professor of social science at UC Irvine.

Said Petracca, who is researching how public policy toward the airport has been shaped: “People seem to be very intolerant. A 98 decibel level might have bothered them (residents) a lot five or six years ago. Even if that airport is now down to 75 decibels, it still bothers them. . . . And even though the the ambient noise level is less than it was five years ago, the incidents of opportunity to be bothered by an airplane have increased. Not to mention the fact that they’ve been encouraged by the community associations to report complaints.

“When you go out and talk to some of these people about the noise level and present them with this technical information about the aggregate reduction in the noise problem, their response is, quite naturally I think: ‘I don’t care. It still bothers me.’ ”

Petracca said this creates problems for policy makers. “How do you convince a population that the problem they once thought existed, because in fact it did exist, no longer exists at a level that even approaches a harmful level, even though they are still bothered by it?”

Petracca said community groups have been very successful in keeping John Wayne Airport from becoming a much larger, more bothersome complex, but often feel as though they have accomplished little or nothing.

Access to Courts

He also suspects that “a lot of the community organizations would have to maintain a noise orientation to the problem to continue to allow them effective legal access (to the court system), which historically has been the only effective way” to fight airport expansion.

Edwards, the airport noise abatement officer, said complaints increase whenever the airport is in the news.

“Also, we see a rise whenever a particular group is urging residents to call and complain,” she said. “We also make a note of it whenever we see that one or two individuals are responsible for a disproportionate number of calls.”

Occasionally, Edwards said, people will call every hour on the hour, for an entire day, but then not be heard from again for several months.

“The weather is also a factor. Sound travels differently under varying atmospheric conditions. One time people complained that they heard a large jet taking off after the airport’s 11 p.m. curfew. . . . Investigation revealed that the plane they heard wasn’t from John Wayne at all. It was a plane passing by at 20,000 feet over the coast on its way north, but it sounded like it was local, at a much lower altitude.”

Edwards said some complaints involve distribution of false information that arouses public ire. She cited the case of a Balboa Island resident who insisted to all her friends--incorrectly--that jetliners leaving John Wayne are required to fly out over the Newport Beach pier to avoid residences.

Effect of Publicity

Barbara Lichman, a member of the grass-roots Airport Working Group, which participated in the negotiations that led to settlement of the airport lawsuit, agreed that complaints increase whenever there has been substantial publicity.

But she said she also believes that the near-doubling of jet flights has irked many residents into believing that little has been accomplished through years of community activism and litigation.

Lichman said the CNEL system for measuring sound is a major factor. “It’s not the best way to determine the aircrafts’ nuisance factor to the community,” she said.

For one thing, CNEL readings are based on 24-hour averages even though the airport is only open to commercial jets from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Such averaging, said Lichman, ignores the so-called “firecracker” effect that single incidents (flights) produce, which is what jangles people’s nerves.

“A firecracker makes a big bang that is really annoying, but if you were to spread out that noise over 24 hours, it wouldn’t look like anything at all,” Lichman said. “It would be a small blip on the charts, if it showed up at all.”

Jean Watt, a member of Stop Polluting Our Newport, a grass-roots group that was actively involved in airport noise lawsuits, said the organization’s newsletter urged people to file noise complaints at about the time the proposed settlement between the city and the county started garnering headlines.

Indeed, there was an increase in complaints during the second and third quarters of 1985, when the settlement negotiations were in the news. Complaints also rose at other key points in time--last December and in January, for example, immediately after the Board of Supervisors announced a major increase in flights.

Complaints Rose

Overall, complaints rose from 465 in 1982 to 698 the following year, 792 in 1984 and 1,521 in 1985. This year, complaints increased in the first six months but declined in the three-month period ended Sept. 30.

The fact that the number of complaints does not seem to be directly related to the number of average daily jet departures is shown in the airport’s quarterly noise reports, which show complaints more numerous in some quarters that had fewer flights and less cumulative noise.

Some residents complain about noise caused by business jets. But again, the figures show that the complaints sometimes rise in quarters when there are fewer business jet operations than in the preceding quarter.

Also, residents are frequently unhappy about the departure paths flown by commercial jets, and airport officials agreed that this influences the number of complaint calls.

Last November, for example, Heath and more than 20 volunteers from the Bluffs Homeowners’ Community Assn. formed an “air watch task force.”

“The prescribed flight pattern for departures out of John Wayne is pretty much down the middle of the Back Bay, “ Heath said. “And the airlines generally seemed to have followed a spray pattern. Some go to the left and some go to the right, and some go down the middle. With the increase in flights at John Wayne, it gets to be pretty annoying. . . .”

Jets Monitored for 30 Days

The task force, said Heath, went out every day for 30 days and observed every commercial jet flight leaving John Wayne.

The group monitored 650 flights, but the data was “cleansed” to exclude private jets and any commercial flights that did not correspond to the airport’s own departure log.

The results confirmed what Eastbluff residents had long suspected: Only about 56% of the remaining 578 flights were out over the bay where they were supposed to be. About 37% of the flights came over the Eastbluff neighborhood in the morning, 62% during the afternoon.

Some airlines were much worse culprits than others. Heath’s data showed that 90% of America West’s flights were off the mark during the morning compared to AirCal’s 18%. Asked last week about the figures, the two airlines declined to provide an explanation.

Partly as a result of this study and Heath’s complaints, the county has reactivated a noise abatement committee that had been dormant for more than a year.

The committee consists of representatives from homeowner groups, airport staff, the business community and the airlines.

Heath and Supervisor Riley said the airlines have indicated to the committee that they will try to do better.

“I’ve been tilting at this windmill for a couple of years now . . . I believe there has been a slight improvement since the committee was reactivated,” Heath said.

Meanwhile, Riley said he is puzzled by the almost steady increase in complaints.

“I’ve been dealing with this problem for years,” said Riley, who represents the district in which the airport is located. “The (aircraft) technology has changed. We are much better off than we were just a few years ago.”