Airport Noise-Control Effort Gets Mixed Reviews

Half a mile past the end of the runway at Van Nuys Airport, a small microphone juts skyward, steadily recording the roar of jets as they take off above.

On cool mornings and blazing afternoons, beneath clear or overcast skies, it distinguishes between a “friendly” takeoff--one that aims to keep noise down for the sake of neighbors--and a not-so-nice departure.

If a plane rumbles into the heavens at a decibel level above the target set by Los Angeles World Airports, airport authorities send the operator a warning letter. But critics say the voluntary “Fly Friendly” program has had scant effect among a group of repeat violators--including such business and entertainment leaders as Barron Hilton, chairman of Hilton Hotels Corp., Jeffrey Sudikoff, former owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and television producer Steven Bochco, the co-creator of “NYPD Blue.”

To airport critics who bristle at the notion that business moguls and movie stars jet out of Van Nuys at the expense of the common folk below, some aviators respond that easy access to air travel is vital to Los Angeles.

“People that make huge investment decisions need to have access, because their time is valuable,” said Stephen Ramsden, president of Jet West International, the company that racked up more citations than anyone else at Van Nuys Airport--85--in less than two years.

Because the program is voluntary, it imposes no fines or other penalties. With the Los Angeles City Council poised to consider tightening restrictions on loud jets later this month, the debate over noise at Van Nuys Airport--long a complaint of nearby residents--has taken on renewed urgency.

“This would be like the Police Department issuing traffic tickets to speeders, but all they are are notices saying, ‘Don’t do it again.’ It’s not even a slap on the wrist, because there are no penalties,” said Gerald Silver, a fierce opponent of airport noise and president of Homeowners of Encino, which issued a report on the citations last week.

“To me, this makes a bold statement that voluntary programs such as Fly Friendly are not working and that regulations are needed,” he said.

Airport officials and operators, however, contend that the program has dramatically reduced jet noise at the airport. They say that the area most affected by the din has shrunk from 1.8 to 1.56 square miles since Fly Friendly began five years ago.

Pilots Can Use Less Thrust

And they are quick to point out that most of the complaints about noise--filed chronologically in a thick binder at the airport--come from Gerald Silver and a handful of others.

To reduce noise, pilots can lower their power settings, lessening their thrust while still maintaining altitude. The plane’s speed will be reduced, but it will climb skyward faster, whisking its noise away with it. The suggested decibel level varies by plane, depending on aircraft type. A Learjet 25, one of the noisiest jets at Van Nuys, is expected to take off at 103.6 decibels or less, but a newer, quieter Gulfstream 4SP has a target level of 90 decibels.

An air raid siren emits a 140-decibel screech, a jackhammer weighs in at about 130 decibels, and a chain saw registers a 100-decibel roar. And that aggravating alarm clock that jolts you awake in the morning? That’s about 80 decibels.

The older, louder planes known as Stage 2 aircraft are prohibited from departing Van Nuys between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. The quieter Stage 3 planes are not affected by the curfew until 11 p.m.

The Fly Friendly program aims to strike a balance between business imperatives at the country’s busiest general aviation airport and homeowner demands for peace and quiet. When airport officials launched it, they tried to come up with target noise levels that half the planes were already meeting, so as to set a reasonable goal that others could achieve.

“The limits, as they’re set, work well overall,” said Stephen Zetsche, who directs the Noise Management Bureau at Van Nuys Airport. “If you make it too hard on the pilots, they may just say, ‘I’m not participating.’ ”

Maurice Laham, the city’s airport environmental manager, said he used three measures to calculate the noise limits for each type of plane. First he combined the guidelines offered by the manufacturer and the National Business Aviation Assn. Then he tested the planes to see how loud they actually were, and averaged in those figures.

The result, like so many of the issues surrounding Van Nuys Airport, was controversial.

Some aviators took issue with the target levels themselves, calling them a flawed measure that discounted variables affecting noise. “When the airplane is full of fuel, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to meet the target level,” said Clay Lacy, owner of the largest charter company based at the airport. “The other thing that greatly affects it is the weather conditions. When it’s overcast, the noise tends to reflect off the clouds, and that makes it noisier.”

Clay Lacy Aviation collected the second-largest number of warning letters for exceeding noise levels--67 since February 1998, the most recent period for which the airport has reliable records. But Lacy said large outfits like his are likely to generate more citations simply because they fly so much. With more than 2,000 departures during the period in question, his pilots crossed the noise threshold only 3.2% of the time.

“I think that our pilots are doing an excellent job,” Lacy said.

The top three violators, in fact, are all large aviation businesses. Jet West International led the pack, followed by Lacy and then Chrysler Aviation, with 61 warning letters.

“The basic problem we have in meeting the noise criteria is that we don’t think they were effectively set,” said Ramsden of Jet West. Nevertheless, he said, the company removed three noisy Learjets from Van Nuys and invested in the development of new “hush kits” to muffle the roar of older planes.

Noise Has Been Reduced

Despite the high number of citations since February 1998, Jet West and Chrysler both met the noise targets most of the time. Jet West received warning letters for 6.6% of its takeoffs and Chrysler got them for 6.9% of its flights. Overall, 8.4% of Van Nuys departures exceed the noise limits.

“The program clearly is a success, but we can do better,” said Coby King, an Encino resident who is a member of the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council. “It has clearly reduced, in a perceptible way, the amount of noise that the airport’s neighbors are subjected to. On the other hand, I would be the first to say that 8% out of compliance is 8% too many. Maybe flights that can’t take off safely within the Fly Friendly parameters shouldn’t originate at Van Nuys.”

Some repeat violators overshot their assigned noise levels on at least every other flight. Two of the worst were Art Goodwin, Hilton’s personal pilot, whose Cessna Citation V Ultra triggered a warning letter for 55 of its 93 departures, and Hubert Guez, a clothing manufacturer whose Rockwell Sabre-60 exceeded the noise limit on 43 of 54 takeoffs.

Both Goodwin and Hilton declined to comment, but Guez’s pilot, David Gregg, said that after receiving a stack of letters from the airport, he has used a lower power setting during takeoffs to lessen the noise. He has since cleaned up his record, with no citations since July.

“We’ve been flying out on the ragged edge,” Gregg said. “We’re flying very slowly in order to climb as rapidly as possible, which is not the normal way to fly an airplane. We put ourselves at greater risk if we lose an engine.”

Other planes with frequent violations include a Gulfstream 3 owned by Bochco and a Westwind-1124 owned by Jeffrey Sudikoff, former owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team. The planes generated 26 and 48 warning letters, respectively. Sudikoff and a spokeswoman for Bochco referred questions about the planes to the firms that operate them, which did not return calls.

Another noisy plane belongs to Dr. Bernard Salick, the founder of Salick Health Care, a $438-million company that runs hospital-based cancer centers and kidney dialysis clinics. Clay Lacy said his firm operates that plane, a Gulfstream 3, and added that it was noisy because it was often bound for Europe with a full load of fuel.

Two other aircraft operators with multiple noise citations, G.L. Nemirow of Burbank and Hadid Development Corp. of McLean, Va., could not be reached for comment.

Laham, the airport official who helped design the Fly Friendly program, acknowledged that there is a group of aviators--”problem guys,” in his words--who repeatedly exceed the noise levels and receive a warning, only to exceed the threshold again a few days later.

“It’s highly skewed to a certain group of fliers,” he said. But under federal law, the airport cannot make the program mandatory without an extensive, costly study by the Federal Aviation Administration. Imposing a fine is also out of the question, Laham said.

“We can’t fine them, because supposing they pull back on the power, lower the nose, barely increasing the power to increase altitude,” he said. “If the engine coughed, it’s curtains. . . . We never make this kind of rule absolute. Once they’re in the air, we don’t like to mess around with rules with teeth in them.”

The noise complaint hotline at Van Nuys Airport registers dozens of gripes per month, but many of them come from the same cluster of residents. In September, the most recent month for which records are available, there were 90 complaints.

But 42 of them came from Silver, according to airport records. Another regular, Wayne Williams of Sherman Oaks, faxed the airport 10 complaints in a single week that month.

Airport officials said the complaints don’t always correlate with takeoffs that exceed the noise levels. In fact, a few planes that garner frequent warning letters are quieter Stage 3 aircraft. Their target decibel levels are lower than the targets set for Stage 2 planes. Much of the controversy at Van Nuys has centered on the noisier Stage 2 jets.

On Nov. 23, the City Council is slated to consider a ban on adding Stage 2 planes at the airport and phasing out the right to replace those that are already there.

In the meantime, a flurry of Fly Friendly form letters will keep urging those who persist in flying noisily to keep it down.

“I think the non-addition rule will help,” said Laham, who sometimes goes so far as to call the offending aviators.

“I call them, and we have a nice conversation,” he said. “Then I send them some more letters.”

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Frequent Violators

“Fly Friendly” is a voluntary program that records the roar of jets as they take off from Van Nuys Airport. Planes that exceed the target noise level for their type of jet are given a warning. Here are 10 of the worst offenders since February 1998.

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Source: Los Angeles World Airports