Have you heard jets flying low and loud over your house, children’s school, or workplace, sometimes every 2 min or less, sometimes in the middle of the night or early morning? This noise is due to changes by the FAA in March under a program called NextGen, which concentrates air traffic in narrow corridors. As a result, virtually all SFO-bound flights from the South, West, and North converge over Palo Alto using trajectories that often cause substantial noise damage to residents.
Palo Alto has been disproportionately impacted. 3 of the 4 main routes into SFO now converge over Palo Alto. In the last 8 years, SFO arrival traffic increased by only 28%, while arrival traffic for the lowest and noisiest flights (3000-4000 feet) over Palo Alto went up a whopping 131%. In the last 2 years alone, the number of low flights (3000-4000 feet) over Palo Alto increased by 65% while nearby communities saw substantial reductions in low elevation air traffic.
Why should you care?
Many low flying aircraft degrade your health, productivity, and quality of life (as well as your children’s and other loved ones’) resulting in:
- Sleep disruption, stress, and exposure to pollutants such as carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons from aircraft exhaust emissions that undergo chemical changes in sunlight
- Decreased ability to concentrate for learning and working purposes
- Reduced ability to enjoy the outdoors
- Aircraft traffic also impacts property values.
We want the FAA to:
- Include noise and emissions as critical design inputs for arrival and departures routes.
- Distribute noise equitably over populated areas when it cannot be eliminated.
- Adopt more meaningful noise assessment methods on the ground.
What YOU can do!
- File noise complaints with SFO in one click with stop.jetnoise.net
- Login once through Gmail or Facebook (stop.jetnoise does not see or store your password but will email
complaints to SFO on your behalf). Create an icon on your phone or computer home screen for easy access. - We prefer that you use stop.jetnoise.net because it is simple, gives you flight data, and makes it easier to roll
up and analyze complaints. - At least one click per day to keep the planes away: one complaint from 100 different people carries much
more weight than 100 complaints from one person.
- Login once through Gmail or Facebook (stop.jetnoise does not see or store your password but will email
- Contact Congresswoman’s Eshoo’s office (eshoo.house.gov/contact; 408-245-2339) to demand that she
make addressing this issue a top priority. In addition, fill out her SFO noise survey (tinyurl.com/nlpne5a) - Visit the Sky Posse Palo Alto website (skypossepaloalto.org) and get involved:
- add a personal note to this flier and distribute it in your neighborhood.
- sign our petition to reduce jet noise over Palo Alto (click the Sign petition! icon)
- join our mailing list (click Join our mailing list on the website)
- follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/skypossepa) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/skypossepaloalto )
- Sign the petition to ask airlines to spend less than $5000 per jet to retrofit their Airbus A320
series with airflow deflectors to stop the loud “whistling” sound (bit.ly/1OJAVok) as required in Europe.