It started with a simple question by a resident during the October 20th virtual Hanscom Field Advisory Commission meeting with Massport: who does Massport share air noise complaints with?
The surprising answer: almost no one.
The Massport Administrative Manager for Hanscom Field, Amber Goodspeed, explained that aircraft pilots and owners are only informed about noise complaints generated by their aircraft, if their flights take place between 11 pm and 7 am.
Complaints filed about air noise generated by daytime flights are not passed on to flight schools, corporate jet operators, or private aircraft operators/owners, even though daytime flights make up 98 to 99 percent of the thousands of total monthly flight operations at Hanscom (calculated for 2019 and 2020 to date), Goodspeed said flight schools do not practice touch and go flights at night.
Asked about the Massport meetings with flight schools to discuss “touch and go” practice flights that Goodspeed has referred to during prior HFAC meetings, she explained that those quarterly meetings are called for the specific purpose of discussing complaints about flight school pattern practice over the Hartwell Tavern within the Minute Man National Historic Park. Issues with noise complaints generated by flight school practice over other more populated locations, neighborhoods, or towns are not brought up at the meetings with the flight schools.
The quarterly meetings began in 2009, when flight school pilots were requested to avoid flights over the historic Hartwell Tavern. Asked if that could have resulted in more practice flights being shifted to more populated areas, especially neighborhoods in Bedford, Goodspeed replied, “No,” but admitted she hadn’t checked specific flight tracks over Bedford recently.
HFAC chair, Christopher Eliot, of Lincoln suggested that as a first step to increase communication with flight school pilots, the monthly listing of the number of air noise disturbance reports associated with particular towns be posted for the flight schools to “get some sense of what neighborhoods perceive their impact to be.”
“Maybe it’s just five jerks?” One resident speculated, saying she believed most pilots at the airport were great people. Another resident strongly supported Eliot’s idea of creating a feedback loop that includes the thousands of daytime flights per month, suggesting the whole Massport noise response system is in fact a joke if complaints never get back to the operators.
However, Thomas Hirsch, HFAC member, representative of the Hanscom Pilots Association, and Bedford resident, protested that the information provided in the Massport monthly noise report is not specific enough to give pilots useful information on what flight track could have triggered the complaint. A resident pointed out that Airnoise button filings automatically provide the exact information (location coordinates, altitude, time, and distance from point of complaint) that pilots need to understand how their actions relate to disturbance reports.
After further discussion of the problem of communicating to pilots and flight schools about which of their activities are generating repeated noise disturbance reports, Emily Mitchell, HFAC and Bedford Select Board member concurred with Eliot and Hirsch, saying, “I would support closing that feedback loop as much as possible.”
Eliot added that he planned to put the issue on the November HFAC meeting agenda for further discussion. “I think this is important. We’d like to see what the airport management has to say and what proposals might come out of this. I think the community sense is that there should be a closed loop … that operators should somehow be made aware of specific complaints about their operations.” He then requested that Goodspeed discuss the matter with Massport’s Hanscom Airport Manager, Sharon Williams, and with the Massport Community Relations representative, Anthony Gallagher, and formulate a response for the next HFAC meeting.
HFAC’s next virtual meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. People who would like to receive email notice of HFAC meetings and agendas may register at the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission website hosted by the Town of Lincoln at https://www.lincolntown.org/AgendaCenter/Hanscom-Field-Airport-Commission-58.
To see how the pandemic has affected overall airfield activity at Hanscom Field, click here https://thebedfordcitizen.org/2020/10/flight-operations-recovery-stalls-in-early-fall-hanscom-field-advisory-commission-october-2020/
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