January 2026 Important Action Item re. drones!

Your immediate action is requested to comment on the FAA’s proposed nationwide framework to approve drone package delivery operations through a Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA). Our friends at Aviation-Impacted Community Alliances (AICA) have alerted us to the fact that this proposal sets us up for a repeat of the NextGen process. NextGen is responsible for the significant noise increases in our community and which MCQSC has spent years trying to reduce. If finalized, this framework would allow drone delivery hubs, flight routes and corridors, and operational expansions to proceed across communities without a requirement for separate, location-specific environmental review or public notice. Commenting is easy and may only take a few minutes. Comments are due by January 23rd.

Instructions for commenting are HERE.

Why This Matters - NextGen All Over Again

• Relies on an antiquated noise threshold that fails to capture lived experience.
  The Draft PEA uses the outdated DNL 65 noise significance threshold, which fails to capture the count and concentration of repeated very low-altitude drone overflights over the same neighborhoods and future flight corridors. (DNL 65 averages noise over a 24-hour period. If this average is less than 65 decibels, as it usually is thanks to less traffic late night/early morning, then the noise increase is not considered significant.)

• Uses DNL 65 as the primary gatekeeper for significance, structurally predetermining outcomes.
  Because DNL 65 is the primary trigger for noise significance, the Draft PEA is structurally predisposed toward a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), at the time of initial hub approval and even as operations substantially increase, where communities experience high counts of overflight events.

• Classifies frequent and disruptive overflights, including operations evaluated up to 24 hours per day, as insignificant under the analytical framework. Under this framework, communities can experience frequent, intrusive drone noise while impacts remain classified as insignificant, not due to lack of disruption, but because the metric does not reflect event-based exposure.

• Drone overflights can be as loud as aircraft noise communities already endure.
  Based on FAA-reported en route single-event noise levels, individual drone overflights can be comparable in loudness to aircraft noise associated with NextGen, while occurring much closer to people on the ground.

• Repeats the structural failures of NextGen.
  As with NextGen, reliance on averaged noise metrics risks enabling concentrated operations, persistent community disruption, and little to no notice or meaningful recourse once approvals are granted.

Read the AICA Comment, link here.