STUDIO CITY : Helicopter Noise Is Focus of Meeting

Studio City residents plan to meet tonight to plot a surface-to-air campaign against the noise made by helicopters flying over their homes from Van Nuys Airport every morning.

At the 8 p.m. meeting, leaders of an anti-chopper group called “Stop the Noise” will discuss efforts to raise the minimum altitude required by the Federal Aviation Administration to 1,000 feet in the Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica Mountains and nearby areas.

Residents also are seeking--through petitions to the FAA and testimony before Los Angeles city officials--restrictions on the hours many helicopters are allowed to fly.

“The first one usually doesn’t wake you up,” said Gerry Silver, president of the Homeowners of Encino. “It’s the barrage of the five or six that follow that come whooshing over your house before 6 a.m. that get you out of bed.”

Silver has spent hours with his ear to his radio scanner and his eye on the horizon to identify the offending helicopters and their patterns, and is now gathering signatures supporting a minimum altitude requirement. The FAA currently does not impose such a limit in residential areas, he said.

Police, fire and medical helicopters used during emergencies would be exempted from the height restriction, under Silver’s proposal.

Silver said many helicopters used by TV and radio stations, sightseeing tours and other private enterprises follow a path that roughly traces the Ventura Freeway from the Van Nuys Airport and through the Cahuenga Pass, traveling as low as several hundred feet.

“People have lived with the noise for a long time, but they were not aware where it was coming from,” Silver said. “Now that they know, they are incensed.”

Campaigns such as “Stop the Noise” are part of an escalating war by homeowners--especially in the southernmost part of the San Fernando Valley--to protect market values in their quiet neighborhoods, which skyrocketed during the real estate boom of the 1970s.

The “Stop the Noise” meeting will be held as part of the monthly gathering of the Studio City Residents Assn., at the Carpenter Avenue Elementary School auditorium, 3909 Carpenter Ave.