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A more in-depth data review has only reinforced County Executive Andy Spano’s stance that the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed rerouting of planes would negatively affect hundreds of thousands of Westchester residents. In fact - he has now concluded - the situation would be even worse than anticipated.

The analysis of the “voluminous and belatedly received data” provided by the FAA makes it clear that there would be noise impacts on many Westchester communities – among them parts of Yonkers, Hawthorne, Thornwood, Peekskill, North Salem, Pound Ridge and Chappaqua, Spano said. Other communities would also see their noise levels change.

These conclusions are drawn from the county’s analysis of a Noise Mitigation Report supplied by the FAA. Spano submitted a full detailed report on the proposed airspace redesign -- prepared by the county’s noise consultant -- to the FAA this week. In an attached letter, he indicated that the project would adversely affect Westchester and asked that the FAA repair its “far from adequate” procedures by holding a meeting to involve the public.

“The FAA would like us to believe that its proposal for handling air traffic would have little if any affect on the communities involved, but as we can clearly see from the data, that is simply not true,” he said. “This new flight plan would have unacceptable impacts on Westchester. We have taken many steps over the past eight years to mitigate aircraft noise and this proposal would only take us backward.”

Under the new scenario, despite the FAA’s calculations, people who never worried about aircraft noise will find it’s become an issue. Besides writing a letter to Steve Kelley, the program manager for the FAA's airspace redesign, Spano has reached out to Westchester’s federal delegation and gotten their support.

The FAA says its alternative way of handling air traffic around New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia would help the industry handle the growing number of flights while reducing air delays and making air travel more reliable. The FAA’s so called ‘mitigated preferred alternative’ for the  New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Airspace Redesign -- one of a number of proposals studied -- would combine high-altitude and low-altitude airspace to create more efficient arrival and departure routes, it has said. The FAA claims the proposal would save an estimated 12 million minutes of delay annually for the four major metropolitan airports — Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark and Philadelphia.

The county has already submitted comments objecting to the FAA’s proposal on two separate occasions, most recently in May. However, those reports were incomplete because the detail data  needed to fully understand and comment upon the noise impacts was only provided by the FAA two days before the early May deadline.
“We can’t design airspace but we could have worked with them to find a better solution,” Spano said. “They need to use more sophisticated techniques and take more time to consider the impacts.”

A June 22, 2007 memorandum by the county’s consultant, Harris Miller Miller & Hanson, Inc., summarizes its review of the additional draft environmental impact statement (DEIS)-related documentation, including the belatedly received detailed data. According to that memorandum, the FAA's most recent proposal reduces noise exposure to some areas of the county compared to the previous "unmitigated preferred alternative," but there is still increased noise in some areas of the county,

The county’s consultant believes that the analysis provided in its most recent report, together with the other issues raised by its review, justify a request that the FAA provide further documentation and conduct additional analysis of the proposed action.

Spano, who has consistently objected to the airspace redesign, has asked the FAA to release all the information regarding noise impacts and wants the agency to prepare a supplemental DEIS that addresses and clarifies all relevant issues – something the agency has said it will not do. He has also asked that his request for the comment period to be extended be included in the record, and said that because of the new data, the FAA should hold a public meeting where residents would have a chance to make comments.

The agency expects to publish the final Environmental Impact Statement sometime this summer and decide how to proceed with the airspace redesign project, in late summer 2007.