SANTA CRUZ — It’s not that the Federal Aviation Administration didn’t want to work with local legislators and their constituents to ease airplane noise in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. In the instance of the SERFR or “Big Sur” flight path, it’s that the requested design criteria were impossible to satisfy, an FAA spokesperson said this week.
Through a recent press release from their congressional offices, Reps. Anna Eshoo, Jimmy Panetta and Jackie Speier voiced disappointment over the FAA’s decision not to adopt the Select Committee on South Bay Arrivals’ recommendation to create a new NextGen procedure for arrivals from the south into San Francisco International Airport.
“The Select Committee worked tirelessly for nine months … and held thirteen public meetings throughout our three Congressional Districts with over 3,500 constituents participating in the meetings to develop the SERFR/BIG SUR consensus recommendations,” the leaders wrote.
The FAA spokesperson told the Sentinel that some of the design elements requested by the committee were not compatible with FAA safety criteria. These recommendations included overflying fewer people, crossing the Monterey Bay shoreline above 12,500 feet MSL (mean sea level, or flight altitude above the sea) and crossing the MENLO waypoint (or a flight route convergence situated in the airspace above Highway 101 in Menlo Park) at above 5,000 feet MSL and maintain idle power until the HEMAN waypoint (another route convergence situated in Redwood City east of Bair Island).
In the case of the Monterey Bay shoreline recommendation, FAA’s safety criteria indicate aircraft would have to be able to cross between 10,000 and 15,000 feet above mean sea level.
In the case of crossing the MENLO waypoint at or above 5,000 feet above mean sea level and maintaining idle power until the HEMAN waypoint, the FAA said to the Sentinel that it is unable to ensure that aircraft will be at idle power until the HEMAN waypoint or that every aircraft will be above 5,000 feet mean sea level at or near the MENLO location. Additionally, current FAA safety criteria preclude the procedure from continuing to HEMAN.
“We take community recommendations and the intent of a request into consideration nationwide, but we must design to FAA safety criteria,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Timely responses
Eshoo, Panetta and Speier also criticized the FAA for how long it took the agency to provide a report back with an analysis addressing the Select Committee’s 104 recommendations. The FAA spokesman said that after receiving the recommendations in late 2016, the agency issued an interim report in 2017 on its efforts to evaluate the recommendations. Updates continued to be issued every few months.
In 2018, as Santa Cruz County leaders were voting to join a regional roundtable to address the frustration caused by SERFR, the FAA designed a workgroup to design a new route as requested by Select Committee.
“Given the importance of SERFR to the communities, we worked hard to mature a SERFR design that best met the Select Committee’s recommendations. That process took significant time, and was extended by external factors including a five-week lapse in federal government funding, which created months of backlog for us when we returned to work,” they said.
Then, the FAA had to go through the California State Office of Historic Preservation Office to make sure that the overlay it had designed that met six of the nine criteria would have no adverse impact on historic properties. In November 2020, the Historic Preservation Office informed the FAA that there would be no adverse impact.
The FAA had planned to brief all involved parties on the status of the design in 2020. A recording of the Santa Clara/Santa Cruz Counties Airport/Community Roundtable meeting from Oct. 28, 2020, however, shows that a member of Rep. Eshoo’s office requested just days before the meeting that the roundtable not be briefed on the route design due to the ongoing CZU Lightning Fire.
The staff member said in an email many community members were unable to participate because they were still without basic needs such as water or power.
A representative from Eshoo’s team was unable to respond about the delay before publishing.
History of strife
Complaints from residents in the region began when, in an attempt to update Northern California flight paths from a ground-based overlay route system to a satellite-based overlay route system called NextGen, the flight path near Big Sur was reinvented in March 2015. The move, the FAA explains on its website, was meant to modernize America’s transportation system to make flying safer, more efficient and more predictable.
In Santa Cruz County, this meant that planes now flew over Capitola, Soquel and Happy Valley instead of Santa Cruz’s Westside and the ridge between San Lorenzo Valley and Highway 17.
As a result of the decision to move the route approximately 3 miles, more than 3 million noise complaints were lodged due to a change in descent procedure — the need to brake to stay in the San Francisco Class B airspace. The FAA spokesperson said that this safety vulnerability has since been corrected and the new route is now fully contained within the airspace.
Then, residents were divided when the idea of moving the flight path back through a proposed route called DAVYJ was presented in October 2016 and implemented by accident in February 2018.
In June 2019, FAA representatives attended the roundtable’s fifth meeting and informed members of the public that community engagement around the idea of moving the route back to the original Big Sur overlay could take one to two years.
Since then, the FAA spokesperson said, the agency has sought to work with roundtables that encompass feedback from residents and elected officials — many of which have written letters on the subject for the Sentinel’s print editions.
“We will continue to work with the community roundtables should they wish to submit new consensus recommendations,” the spokesperson wrote. “If FAA safety criteria and new technologies evolve, we might be able to revisit the issue in the future.”
The legislators, too, made a promise to keep the issue from being shelved.
“Our constituents’ participation brought the FAA to the table for a dialogue on airplane noise reduction, and we are committed to supporting their continuing efforts,” the lawmakers added in a statement.