PEER Files Lawsuit To Quiet Skies Over National Parks

Last October, while marveling over the gushing Riverside Geyser in Yellowstone National Park, I happened to look up and saw a small jet making circles overhead. Obviously, the pilot and his passengers wanted to watch the eruption as well. According to the National Park Service, that was the only authorized overflight for the month in Yellowstone, but across the National Park System there were tens of thousands of overflights last year that, while providing a bird's eye view of spectacular scenery, can be an annoyance to those on the ground.

In a bid to bring some better management of park overflights into being, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, along with Hawaii Island Coalition Malama Pono, has sued the Federal Aviation Administration. According to the lawsuit filed last week, "nearly 65,000 air tours, most concentrated over a few parks, took off last year without limit on the number, routes, or timing of flights."

The filing asks that the FAA be ordered to "develop an Air Tour Management Plan or voluntary agreements as directed by statute for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Haleakalā National Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument, Glacier National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park."

“The Park Service is supposed to protect parks for present and future generations but its jurisdiction in essence ends at the treetops,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that several parks, such as Glacier, have tried to end helicopter and fixed-wing air tours but are powerless without action by the FAA. “Our lawsuit is designed to curb damaging overflights and require the FAA to finally manage what is now basically a flying free-for-all.”

The overflights create a number of problems, and not just for park visitors, the lawsuit claims, citing a number of incidents, including:

* A recorder of soundscapes in Haleakalā National Park whose work product, which includes assisting national parks with soundscape studies and identifying wildlife species, has been interrupted by over 4,500 annual overflights which mask the natural ambience and negatively affect the behavior of wildlife, thus making soundscape recording and wildlife identification significantly more difficult to obtain;

* A retired ecologist who now leads tours and birding expeditions through the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, as well as camps and hikes in the area himself—who has found that the aircraft diminish the natural quiet he enjoys, reduce the quality of his tours, and make it harder to listen for birds;

* A tour company operator and an environmental educator in Muir Woods National Monument who have experienced disturbances, every few minutes, from over 1,000 annual overflights. The tour operator’s business is negatively affected by diminishing customer experience when customers are forced to cover their ears constantly. The environmental educator, who lives near the National Monument, experiences decreased quiet enjoyment of her own property by having to keep all windows closed to maintain concentration.

* In Glacier National Park, a nearby resident’s weekly all day hikes have been ruined by the constant noise of over 750 annual overflights. These overflights are also heard from his property from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. PEER members also include three former public employees at Glacier National Park – a former backcountry ranger and wildlife biologist, a former backcountry ranger and water systems operator, and a former state and national park management employee – whose professional experiences with nature in Glacier National Park have been altered by the overflights.

* In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the owner of a tour guide company whose work and personal life have been disrupted by over 800 annual overflights which interrupt silent walks and destroy a key purpose of the guided tours - positive experiences with nature - by causing employees and customers to want to duck every fifteen minutes from the constant buzzing overhead; and

* A former Bryce Canyon National Park employee whose photographs have been ruined by the high altitude airplane contrails of over 450 annual overflights entering his landscape photography and who has also been deprived of the subtle natural sounds of wildlife, ultimately displacing his hiking locations.

"Nor are negative impacts limited to park boundaries," PEER added in its release. "Near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, for example, hundreds of homes lie in the path of air fields from which as many as 80 flights a day and more than 15,000 last year were launched. Residents say that helicopter noise is constant and year-round, causing many to lose sleep, suffer from stress, and a host of other complaints."

Congress in 2000 enacted the National Park Air Tour Management Act directing the FAA, in consultation with Park Service, to “establish an air tour management plan for any national park or tribal land whenever a person applies for authority to conduct a commercial air tour.” Those plans are to be developed for parks where more than 50 tour overflights per year are conducted, the lawsuit said.

But the FAA, whose mission is to promote commercial aviation, since NPATMA was passed in 2000 has yet to establish a single air tour management plan during the ensuing 17 years and shows no signs of doing any in the future, according to PEER.

"Instead of developing management plans, the FAA has simply issued 'interim' authorizations year after year that essentially grandfather in all tour operators," the advocacy group claims. "All told, it has issued an estimated 300,000 interim approvals without any environmental review or meaningful national park input."

“Unless the FAA acts, air tour operators have no incentive to negotiate voluntary restrictions to minimize impacts on parks,” Mr. Ruch said. “Our lawsuit is meant to jumpstart a planning process that should have begun a generation ago.”