(note: the uncopyrighted text below is was originally published on STN's web site, reproduced here without modification)

STOP the NOISE

What's The Problem

We are not close to an airport or runway. We live, by choice, in a relatively rural area 50 miles northwest of Boston. We live here because it is inherently quiet. We tend to live on larger, sometimes much larger, parcels of land than the city and suburban folk. Left to ourselves, a loud noise here occurs when a strong winds blows hard  through the trees. It's a real nice place to live. It worth fighting for.

Enter the recreational flyers. They can only practice their hobby if they have someone else's land to fly over. They are not simply navigating from point A to point B. They have navigated to our back yards and are now loitering above us either sightseeing or practicing noisy maneuvers that serve no purpose other than to please the pilots and those who rented them the airplane. These fall into three general categories, sightseers and Sunday flyers, students practicing basic maneuvers such as circling, and the aerobatic or stunt pilots. Of these, while fewer in number, the aerobatic pilots are by far the worst.  

Aerobatic/stunt planes are different from other aircraft in that they do not merely fly over an area and leave (exercising a presumed right of free navigation).  

They stay in one area, using local land marks (such as railroad tracks, water towers, ponds, quarries, and sports fields) as reference points for their maneuvers.  

When one aircraft departs the area and another takes its place. It is not uncommon for this activity to take place from sunup to sundown during the summer months. Such regular, coordinated activity suggests that it is coordinated by the airfield owners and flight school operators who make a pretty good living essentially renting out your back yard to their clients. They deny this, but such efficient utilization is not likely a chance occurrence.

We have found that the pilots and the FAA, with absolutely no consultation with the property owners, have declared certain areas to be de facto aerobatics practice boxes and flight training areas.  The locations most often used for such activity are typically rural, naturally quiet, of larger than average parcel size, populated by people seeking to escape the crowd and noise of the urban areas, and represent a sizeable investment on the part of the owners. The perverse logic of this situation is that the more isolated one is, the more likely one will be invaded by these dirtbikers of the air. One of the less obvious reasons is that in a one man - one vote society sparsely populated areas have less political clout.

It is the position of STOP THE NOISE that this constant flying in one place creates unreasonable, unbearable and unhealthy noise to those on the ground, and constitutes an unwanted and un-granted easement over private property to the pilots and to their related business interests. We believe that the present model which grants property owners relief only at the pleasure and the mercy of the pilots is fundamentally flawed. We seek to correct this so that the model used is one in which the pilots seek permission of the property owners before operating over and projecting their waste noise on their land. Remember these aerobatic aircraft perform no useful function and can make no claim to even the remotest socially redeeming value that might justify such a wanton taking of property and destruction of peoples lives.

Recent (1958) laws favoring the giant aviation industry have usurped the rights of private property owners by granting aviators carte blanche in the airspace over your property. Prior to this time, your property was considered to extend from the center of the earth to the limits of the atmosphere. What the federal government seized was an avigation easement through all of our airspace. No compensation was given or offered. Aircraft operate over our lands in airspace that still belongs to the property owner beneath by exercising privileges granted to the airmen by the FAA in its use of the seized easement.

Although the Supreme Court has held that a fundamental principle of property ownership is the right to exclude others from your property, this no longer applies in the vertical axis. The main reason for excluding others from your property is to achieve and maintain privacy, peace and quiet. Such law and regulation must be reversed. Aircraft must be channeled into narrow corridors. The unfortunate ones owning those corridors do not seek compensation, they seek relief and restored control over their lands and skies. As this will reduce the amount of an already limited resource, this may mean that not everyone who wants to fly will be able to fly. So be it.

STOP THE NOISE is committed to seeking all legal remedies to this problem:     

 

©2004 General Aviation Legal Defense Fund