If you’ve been noticing more jet airplane noise over Malibu lately, you’re not wrong. In recent months, the Federal Aviation Administration, in an effort to modernize the National Airspace System, has introduced a new satellite-based air traffic control that it claims allows it to guide and track air traffic more precisely and efficiently. Problem now is: More flights than ever are being funneled over Malibu and some residents are fuming that their once bucolic neighborhoods now seem to be positioned as if they were LAX runways with hundreds of flights booming overhead daily, shaking their former peaceful, quiet hamlets.
Two of the neighborhoods hardest hit with jet noise are Big Rock and Monte Nido. Tom Canning has been a resident there for 37 years and said he moved there to be “an hour away from an airport or freeway.”
In all those decades, he called jet noise a “curiosity at best.” Then in August, Canning says he noticed, “What the heck is going on? Is the Air Force doing maneuvers?
“Before I knew it we were looking at 150 to 200 planes flying over a day at super low altitudes,” he said. “Very low—screeching and roaring. Now it’s never quiet. It’s driving me and other residents crazy.”
This is not a Malibu specific problem. In the past few years, the FAA has steadily been implementing its new application called NextGen that tracks flight paths across the country. Routes have been consolidated into narrower areas and, in some cases, the altitudes planes fly lowered. Canning says the FAA’s argument is that “the narrowing of the flight paths makes it safer and noise will impact people on the ground less—it’ll be more environmentally friendly.” But he adds the FAA may have underestimated citizen blowback. A number of cities nationwide have filed lawsuits against the FAA and local airports in an effort to reduce noise. Newport Beach successfully sued John Wayne Airport to get flight patterns changed.
“Their assertion that this will be more environmentally friendly and affect less people has been proven to be completely wrong in case after case,” Canning said.
Canning is now a part of a grassroots movement called “Quiet Skies” and is enlisting help from Congressman Ted Lieu and Senator Diane Feinstein. The Malibu City Council also took action in September, authorizing the city to send letters to the FAA and Los Angeles World Airports to stop the implementation of new flight paths until the repercussions can be assessed due to the amount of complaints coming in from Malibu and surrounding communities.
Thirty-year veteran military pilot Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Rick Mullen is now a member of the Los Angeles Airport Community Noise Roundtable and attended a meeting at LAX with an FAA official on how to mitigate noise. The decades-old group was initially made up of communities with historic, chronic LAX noise such as Inglewood and El Segundo, but with Mullen representing Malibu, he says he’s fighting for “neighborhoods experiencing greater air traffic or local air traffic that have never experienced it before. That’s what appears to be the case with this route that departs from Los Angeles and goes into our area.”
Mullen has applied to join a national equivalent of the LA-based noise mitigation group called NOISE (National Organization to Insure a Sound Controlled Environment).
“What we are experiencing in Malibu is happening all over the country,” Mullen said. “My intention is to get those routes back to where they used to be. I am optimistic that this problem can be solved.”
Becky Pfau lives near Monte Nido and works from home. She says the unrelenting rumble of planes overhead affects her quality of life and disrupts her work.
“All that sound ricochets off the rocks near my home,” Pfau described. “The jets come in every two to five minutes. It’s noise all the time.”
‘This is an unsustainable amount of traffic,” Canning related, “and noise that’s been clobbering us day after day. The flight patterns need to get expanded out and the altitudes are just way too low. When they come northbound the jets are flying so low I can see the windows on jumbo jets! You can imagine how loud that can get. The skies are never quiet now. It never stops.”
With 20 years flying locally, veteran Los Angeles media airborne reporter Meghan Reyes told The Malibu Times, “Malibu is beautiful from the ground and from the air. But if you can spot aircraft tail numbers—that may be too low.”