Noise About Noise

The Interior Department has abdicated its responsibility for dealing with tourist flights over and within Grand Canyon to the Federal Aviation Administration. And now the FAA has failed to deal effectively with the environmental problem of noise pollution. The new FAA regulations proposed Tuesday may not even be adequate from a safety standpoint.

Congress should have lost patience by now with this dallying. Certainly Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Interior Committee, has. “This shocking failure to stand up for Grand Canyon National Park is one of the sorriest acts of an Administration whose record of defense of our national park system already leaves a great deal to be desired,” Udall said. Indeed.

The FAA announced last December that it would propose restrictions banning most flights in the canyon and in a 2,000-foot zone above the rim. But the rules advanced this week are far more lenient, and still would allow flights below the rim in many areas of the park.

The solution is evident: the passage of bills sponsored by Rep. Tony Cohelo (D-Merced) and Sen. Spark M. Matsunaga (D-Hawaii) to ban tour flights below the Grand Canyon rim and to limit the buzzing over other parks, including California’s Yosemite and Hawaii’s Haleakala. A similar Cohelo bill passed the House 378 to 12 over Administration opposition last year, but died in the Senate during the fall rush to adjourn.

Give some credit to William Penn Mott, director of the National Park Service, who has suggested, appropriately, that all flights be required to remain at least 2,000 feet above the Grand Canyon rim. Mott’s suggestion, as so often happens with his sound proposals, was scuttled in the upper echelons of the Interior Department, where pressure from air-tour operators apparently found a receptive target.

Some attention was diverted from the noise problem last year when an air-tour plane and a helicopter collided in the canyon, killing 25. With more than 50,000 flights carrying tourists over and in the canyon annually, safety became the primary concern. But the environmental noise problem remains the most persistent issue in the canyon, and the Interior Department has both the responsibility and the authority to act.

The only sound that has come from the Interior Department is that of buck-passing. Now it is time for Congress to make some noise on this issue.