Saturday, December 11, 1999
By ADAM GELLER
Staff Writer
Atop the control tower at Newark International Airport,
Dan D'Agostino has only to glance at the radar -- or out the window -- for a reminder that
Newark's claim on the region's air space is hotly contested.
"There's not a dull moment and there's not an inch of
space that isn't used," said D'Agostino, president of the National Air Traffic
Controllers Association in Newark. "If we look out the window, we can see the guys
lined up going into Teterboro. It's the most congested airspace in the world."
That congestion has been the subject of a renewed outcry
from public officials and area residents since a private plane plunged into a Hasbrouck
Heights neighborhood Thursday, on its approach to Teterboro.
Public officials and area residents say they are fed up
with flight patterns that route a non-stop parade of planes over densely populated
neighborhoods, putting thousands of North Jerseyans at risk.
"We need to take actions to avoid similar crashes in
the future," Rep. Steve Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, said Friday. "This tragedy, as
well as the tragedy that occurred in [Newark] two weeks ago, raises very serious questions
about the safety of planes making landing approaches over residential areas."
But D'Agostino and other transportation experts say a
solution is far more complex than giving pilots revised instructions.
Instead, they say, Teterboro's flight routes are
overlapped and intertwined in an incredibly complex web of approach and landing patterns
that govern all metropolitan area air traffic and that must be examined as a whole.
"If you look at the published procedures for takeoffs
and landings around here and compare it with another area, you'll see that it's a lot more
convoluted around here," said Paulo Santos of Red Bank, Monmouth County, a private
pilot who runs Airnav.com, a Web site dedicated to flight planning.
Those loops and curves are built into regional flight
routes so planes don't interfere with those from other airports, and to keep them away
from as many neighborhoods as possible, Santos said.
Tweaking flight patterns here and there won't work,
planners say.
"Because of the congestion of airspace throughout the
region, the Port Authority [of New York and New Jersey] position has been that these
issues need to be addressed with a regional approach," said Greg Trevor, a spokesman
for the agency, which owns all the region's major airports.
The Federal Aviation Administration is, in fact, in the
midst of redrawing New York area flight routes, the first step in a redesign of air
patterns used nationwide.
But the effort, still years from completion, has not
convinced officials in towns under flight paths that anything serious is being done to
alleviate the problems.
"We have to come up with a reasonable plan for
quality of life and safety in the area," state Assemblywoman Rose Heck, R-Hasbrouck
Heights, said Friday. "We have a very heavily populated area and we must take every
precaution we can."
Heck's concern about population density is well-founded.
There are 106,000 people living within a two-mile radius of Teterboro's runways, and
little in the way of open space.
In 1997, the airport recorded 169,000 takeoffs and
landings, a 5 percent increase since 1992. However, that increase coincided with a rapid
rise in the number of jets using the airport. In 1997, nearly 82,000 of the airport's
flights were by jets, a 55 percent increase from 1992.
The majority of those planes follow an arrival route that
brings pilots in from the west, over Hasbrouck Heights and Route 17 and then has them bank
left in a wide loop over Moonachie, Ridgefield Park, Bogota, Teaneck, and Hackensack for
their final approach.
Some residents say that those patterns have shifted in
recent years, resulting in more planes roaring over their homes. Others say pilots too
often fail to follow the approved patterns.
"I can stand outside and watch the planes coming in
and . . . these guys are way off path," said Hasbrouck Heights Mayor William Torre,
who lives a few miles north of the approved flight pattern.
But Trevor and D'Agostino said flight patterns for the
metropolitan area have not changed in years.
The current plan was imposed in the mid-1980s to give the
most direct route to planes using John F. Kennedy International Airport, at that time the
region's dominant airport, D'Agostino said.
With Newark International Aiport now competing for that
title, a new plan should shift Newark's flight patterns to some more preferable routes,
D'Agostino said. But much smaller Teterboro will always lie in Newark's shadow and have to
settle for whatever's left, Santos said.
Experts note that flight routes are changed daily because
of weather conditions and other factors, and that the routes must still leave pilots room
to maneuver. Santos said planes tend to drift, and can veer off course up to a mile to
either side of an imaginary center line as a pilot heads for a runway.
Torre says he is realistic enough to know that, so near an
airport, his and other towns will always be disrupted by some planes. But he and other
critics say that if routes cannot be drastically redrawn to take planes away from people,
then other changes need to be considered.
Teterboro's neighbors want to see regulators limit the
number of flights to and from the airport and restrict hours, possibly by closing the
airport overnight.
"The feeling is the less flights, the less risk on
the ground," Torre said.
They also want the FAA to limit the number of larger
aircraft that use the airport, and require the use of quieter, cleaner engines.
"We cannot eliminate the airport but we certainly can
maximize the safety," Heck said.
Staff Writer Robert Gebeloff contributed to this article.
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