Nassau County Residents Call Noise From Frequent Overhead Flights 'Abuse'
EAST HILLS, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) -- Too loud and too low, angry residents in Nassau County have had enough of airplanes flying over their neighborhood.
They say the planes have never been louder.
Some blamed it on a narrower flight path in and out of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports.
Jets roar over Nassau County's north shore -- more than 15 miles from the airports -- in the daytime, dinner time, and bed time.
"It is one plane after the other, after the other, every 30 to 60 seconds, like living in a war zone," Jana Goldenberg said.
Goldenberg, the co-founder of Plane Sense 4 LI, files hundreds of complaints every week over the conga line of low flying planes that has formed overhead since the FAA created nextgen.
The air traffic overhaul enables planes to fly closer together. It saves time and fuel, but also created narrower lanes of air traffic.
In East Hills, the number of planes overhead has more than doubled from LGA and Kennedy.
"You cannot fall asleep, I have to use ear plugs," Plane Sense co-founder, Elaine Miller said.
Miller has replaced her written logs with an app which enables her to file a noise complaint with the push of a button. That's helped rack up more than 11,000 noise complaints in one month.
"We can get 30 hours of straight flights, that is impossible, it's torture, it's abuse," she said. "This needs to change."
Congressman Tom Suozzi said fewer people are being forced to bear a greater burden.
"We have asked the FAA and they said yes, they are studying it right now to look at systemic dispersal of the routes of the planes so it's spread out over a wider area to maintain the efficiencies, but also make these peoples lives better," he said.
A spokesman for the FAA said it's also evaluating route changes and thrust and speed adjustments to reduce noise, and will consider recommendations from the New York Community Aviation Roundtable.
The roundtable was formed 4 years ago, but has yet to come up with any formal recommendations. It's made of mostly people from Queens and Brooklyn residents.
Nassau residents said they want to be heard.
The FAA said they do not have a time frame when it's study of possible route changes might be complete.
