Panel Hears Noise Plan for Airport : Van Nuys: Neighbors’ recommendations to ban the loudest jets and non-emergency night takeoffs and landings will be analyzed.
A panel studying ways to reduce noise at Van Nuys Airport should ban the noisiest jets altogether, prohibit non-emergency takeoffs at night, and do away with landing and takeoff practice on weekends and holidays, airport neighbors urged Monday.
Members of the Van Nuys Part 150 Committee, a panel named after a section of Federal Aviation Administration rules dealing with community participation in airport noise studies, agreed to run the plan through a computer analysis to see how much noise it would reduce.
About 70 people turned out for a hearing by the committee at the Airtel Plaza Hotel beside the airport.
The committee, which has been working for three years to find ways to reduce noise at the airport, has been studying 10 noise-reduction alternatives drafted by a technical subcommittee.
The noise alternatives are judged, in part, by how many homes would fall within an area where a statistical noise measurement exceeds 65 decibels. Airport noise of 65 decibels or louder now reaches 1,445 houses and 3,263 residents around the airport.
By comparison, normal conversation heard three feet away measures 65 decibels, and a typical power lawn mower measures 97 at the same distance.
One alternative that the technical panel supports would require pilots to reduce airplane thrust during takeoffs and extend by one hour a nighttime ban on departures by the noisiest planes--those classified by the FAA as generating 74 decibels of noise on takeoff.
The present noise curfew extends from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. The proposal would begin the curfew at 10 p.m.
Under this plan, the area where the airport noise measurement would exceed 65 decibels would cover 378 houses and 847 residents, according to a five-year projection by the technical panel.
Michael McClintock, a member of the committee, said he backs the alternative recommended by the technical committee.
“This plan will go a long way toward improving relations between this airport and its environs,” he said.
A plan proposed by Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, would ban all non-emergency landings and takeoffs from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. It would also prohibit all jets that generate noise exceeding 74 decibels and also ban touch-and-go training (landing and takeoff practice) and helicopter operations on weekends and holidays.
Silver said at the hearing that only one-third of all planes flying in and out of Van Nuys Airport would be affected under this plan.
However, Maurice Laham, an airport environmental manager and chairman of the technical panel, said the 74-decibel limit would be too restrictive and would leave the airport open to lawsuits by airport tenants.
“A lot of operations at this airport would suffer hardships under this plan,” he said.
A representative of state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes neighborhoods near the airport, said he supports the noise reduction plan proposed by residents.
“In order for a private airport to be compatible with a residential community as densely populated as the San Fernando Valley, it is imperative that these measures to regulate excessive noise pollution be adopted,” he said.
A meeting last week attracted about 150 angry neighbors, many of whom feared that the Part 150 Committee was planning to rezone residential neighborhoods around the facility to drive out homeowners. Committee members, who had said earlier that the proposal was unlikely to be adopted, voted unanimously to eliminate consideration of any such plan.
