About NextGenRelief
What is The FAA’s NextGen Program And How Is It Impacting Communities Across America?
The origins of NextGen began in the early 2000s, when the Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that they would begin a multi-agency, multi-year modernization of the air traffic system that would extend into the future at least 25 years.
According to the FAA, implementing and maintaining NextGen programs will cost about $37 billion through 2030.
The goals of NextGen are relatively straightforward. With the increasing rise of air traffic in the United States, the FAA felt they needed a way to streamline air traffic in order to allow more planes in the sky to accommodate growing passenger and cargo traffic.
NextGen promises to reduce emissions by having planes fly more “efficient” routes, to standardize access to weather information, to reduce separation minimums between aircraft, to improve communications across the airspace system, and to improve onboard technology.
As these communities were to soon find out, that was not an oversight on the FAA’s part.
Since the first implementation of NextGen in Phoenix, Arizona (which resulted in a lawsuit against the FAA by the City of Phoenix), communities across America have found themselves the victims of non-stop air and noise pollution by these newly “efficient” flightpaths.
Communities that once experienced 10-20 flights overhead daily now find themselves subject to 200-300 flights a day overhead, at elevations thousands of feet lower than previous flightpaths. The FAA has insisted that “no new noise” has been created by NextGen flightpaths.
Yet, the numbers speak for themselves.
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport tallied fewer than 25 noise complaints from 2010 -2014. When NextGen changed flight paths in 2014, that number jumped to over 2,500. In 2015, complaints increased to almost 12,000.
Prior to the implementation of NextGen, Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI) received approximately 300 noise complaints a year. Recently, the Maryland Aviation Administration reported that citizens had filed 127,490 noise complaints in the second quarter alone of 2019.
In Medford, outside Boston’s Logan Airport, there were 5,210 complaints filed, for a total of 17,922 complaints filed across the greater Boston area in the first two months of 2019. In all of 2012, before NextGen, Medford residents filed 15 noise complaints.
Post NextGen, more than 81,000 noise complaints were filed about flights at Dulles and National in 2017 in the Washington, DC area, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, and more than 90 percent of those were linked to operations at National.
After NextGen was implemented, there was a massive 2,706% surge in airplane noise complaints in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Does this sound like “no new noise” was created, as the FAA said in one of their 2016 NextGen progress reports?
This website is meant to be an educational resource and gathering place for citizens, reporters, regulators, Members of Congress and their staff, and community activist groups all over America dealing with the repercussions of the FAA’s NextGen program. There is a solution here that can both alleviate the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country and support the FAA’s long-term goal of modernizing air traffic, but there has to be some willingness on the part of the FAA to both recognize the problem, and to be willing to negotiate in good faith.
Thus far, that has not happened.
