"The airline industry's insistence on dramatic and immediate increases in metroplex aircraft density and throughput, with existing equipage and training, required simple, straight in routes to maintain safety. These procedure designs accepted any amount of noise for even the smallest efficiency, with people on the ground paying the cost as a direct subsidy to the airlines. These efficiencies only designs exploded noise in city after city across the U.S."

"It is the executive branch's role to interpret Congressional meaning when implementing a law. But, in this case, the FAA abrogated this traditional executive branch role, and turned the law's interpretation over to the creativity and pennumbraic revelations of the airline industry lobby to ask them what the law should mean."

"The Greener Skies EA demonstrated one of the FAA's most powerful and easy to abuse regulatory tools, its Action/No Action analysis. The FAA first proposes an Action without considering any alternatives, no matter how obvious or advantageous they might be. Then, it compares this Action to a No Action alternative. The most powerful part of this tool is that the FAA is free to define the impacts of both the Action and No Action any way it wants."

"In the end, the 35 Environmental Assessments were done in near secrecy, quickly and in cookie-cutter fashion. They were sprung on communities with minimal notice, and only one or two months to realize they existed, understand them and file objections. In almost all cases, the objections were overruled and the FAA quickly issued prompt Findings of No Significant Impact (FONSI)."

"In reviewing the NextGen Mid-Term Metroplex implementation, it appears the FAA simply asserts whatever data, tests, and reality achieves its goals, with no consistency, rigor, independent oversight, audit, review or concern for the public. Far from its claims to the White House that its expedited EA process would increase transparency, the FAA proceeded with extreme secrecy and misdirection. Its thirty-five metroplex redesigns have been community and FAA public relations disasters. The FAA has achieved little, and made many enemies."

"The industry driven 'Mid-Term' corrections have not made NextGen better. The airlines and A4A continue to criticize NextGen, but the Mid-Term Plan -NowGen- is their plan. The FAA bent over backwards to do exactly as the airlines wished. And, what the airlines pushed for was short-term, benefits-now CFO type thinking. They wanted every bit of the high density metroplex access that NextGen originally promised, but they wanted it on the cheap - cheap to them, expensive to citizens living in the metroplex."

"U.S. airlines, led by its primary lobbying organization, Airlines for America (A4A) successfully excluded air travel from the Paris Climate agreement, and used their influence to pass the European Union Emission Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011, forbidding U.S. airlines from participating in the E.U's Emissions Trading System. Nancy Young, A4A's vice president environmental affairs, and a participant in defining NextGen's noise standards, has led a multi-year effort against any and all carbon regimes, with the one exception of reducing carbon emissions by making arrivals and departures from crowded metroplex airports as direct, straight and low as possible."

"The latter - lower throttle settings - was supposed to reduce 'environmental impact during approaches to land.' This is one of the FAA's biggest Pinocchio's. For an optimized descent to be quiet from the ground, the descent needs to be at flight idle all the way to the runway. Optimized Profile Descents at idle stop at the beginning of the Standard Terminal Arrival (STAR) procedure. So the quiet part of the descent is at altitude, and the noisy part is near the ground. But, to the FAA, its quiet, at least on average."

"Increasing aircraft density in metro airspace around the country was going to be painful no matter what. The FAA planned (but did not deliver) a suite of systems and procedures equivalent to painless density. With TF5, the airlines took over and pared the systems necessary to the absolute minimum needed to increase metroplex density, or in the denistry analogy, they proceeded with just the drill."

"The NextGen Advisory Committee was made up of a 'cross section of aviation industry execs' and was co-chaired that year by Dave Barger, CEO of JetBlue, and Michael Huerta, Acting FAA Administrator. The Committee included an 'environmental representative,' but the disparity between the industry representatives being extremely senior C-level executives, and the one loan environmental representative being a mayor of the Village of Arlington Heights, IL, is striking."

"In preparation for this expected increase in noise, the RTCA NextGen Advisory Committee prepared a sixty-page game plan on how to deal with the public's reaction, with one of its first recommendations being, 'In addition to engaging communities who will be impacted, residents or communities who will benefit should also be engaged.' In other words, set one community against its neighbor."