September 2020 MCQSC Update: U.S. Representatives Send Letter to FAA Demanding It Reevaluate How It Measures Aviation Noise

National News Flash!

You may not realize that in addition to our work with local government officials and the Reagan National Community Working Group, the Montgomery County Quiet Skies Coalition volunteers work closely with other activists around the country and with our congressional delegation to mitigate the airplane noise problems that we know will return across the nation in full force when air travel recovers.  

Although congressional and legislative reform is painfully slow, we also know that systemic change at the national level is necessary to address the aviation noise problem in the long term.  Thus we believe that working with other communities around the U.S. is an essential complement to our local efforts.

In that spirit, we are pleased to share a recent step forward on the national front of this effort. 

Last week, 29 members of Congress from around the country sent a scathing letter to the FAA demanding that the agency take a more serious look at the metrics that it uses to measure noise and to determine whether noise impacts require mitigation.  There is widespread consensus that the metrics the agency currently uses for this purpose fail to capture the current reality of the NextGen environment in which airplanes fly in concentrated rails in the sky.  As long as the agency continues to use these totally inappropriate metrics, it can and will continue to claim that these de facto runway extensions have “no significant impact” and therefore require no mitigation  -- even as the agency is flooded with complaints and lawsuits because the impact is so significant!

We are grateful for the work of MCQSC volunteers and others around the country who worked on this effort -- coordinating something like this across many jurisdictions is very hard work.   We also wish to thank our local congressman, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), for his steadfast support of MCQSC and for joining his colleagues in signing the letter to the FAA.