By Brent Blue, ThroughTheFence.org
The FAA has consistently justified most of their opposition to “through the fence” residential hangars as being related to noise complaints. They have frequently stated that the FAA has spent $1.8 billion to buy land to mitigate noise sensitive neighbors. However, the FAA has never delineated residential hangars from residences which have no airport connection.
In order to find out exactly how much of a problem noise has been for the FAA from hangar home residents, ThroughTheFence.org asked to FAA, through the Freedom of Information Act, for two items related to noise.
One was to produce all the noise complaints from anyone with a “through the fence” agreement (residential, commercial, factory, etc) and a second request for how much money has been spent to buy land to mitigate noise sensitive “through the fence” agreement holders.
The results are staggering! During the past 10 years, the FAA does not have one documented noise complaint from anyone with a “through the fence” agreement. What is more interesting, the FAA can not document one dollar being spent to buy adjacent airport land to mitigate noise issues from “through the fence” agreement holders.
Thus, it is very clear that the noise argument from the FAA is nothing more than “smoke and mirrors”.