Flight path over Santa Cruz County still bothering residents

Excessive noise from jet planes has plagued Santa Cruz County for the past three years, and residents thought they might be getting some relief Thursday.

The FAA made an announcement today that many thought would change a flight path going over Santa Cruz County and quiet things down. Things unfortunately didn’t go that way.

Three years ago this month, the FAA changed a flight path heading into San Francisco International Airport. The change put several jet planes right over parts of Santa Cruz County, making the constant noise unbearable for residents.

“It averaged about, between six and eight thousand complaints a day. There’s been over a million complaints since they made this change,” said Santa Cruz County District Supervisor John Leopold.

“All of a sudden, and sometimes it’s so unpredictable, it’s like shock treatment. It’s like every two minutes, and you’re not sure when they’re coming, and they are so loud. My dogs bark thinking it’s big trucks coming up the road, the windows rattle,” said Save Our Skies Founder Denise Stansfield.

Residents banded together to form groups like Save Our Skies Santa Cruz, and enlisted the help of local politicians to get the FAA to change the flight path to it’s old route where citizens weren’t affected. Despite their efforts, that never happened.

“We have people that are leaving, actually moving out of the area because they can’t get a decent night’s sleep and the peace that they thought they would have has been taken away,” said Patrick Meyer with Save Our Skies.

The talks continued between the groups and the FAA, and in February of this year, a mistake lead to a flight path change that residents thought would help.

“What happened on February first is a contractor responsible for publishing the flight routes published a route on the old flight path, not the current flight path, so the planes did move, but they were louder than they’ve ever been, generating a lot of controversy in the community,” said Leopold.

And with residents still complaining about the noise, they were hopeful that changes to the route by the FAA today would help the problem.

“Today they are making slight safety modifications to the current flight path, and they have not told us when they’re going to enact the recommendations from the select committee, we’re still waiting for that, our members of congress are still waiting for that, but we’re very disappointed in the FAA. We believed that when we worked with them, and they told us that this was important and they told us many times that they were going to follow through on these recommendations, but they haven’t done it yet,” said Leopold.

We reached out to the FAA with several questions and have yet to hear back from them. Supervisor Leopold told us the FAA says the flight path could be changed to a quieter route in August of this year, but only time will tell if that will actually happen.