Airplane noise complaints soar throughout city

The citizens who gripe loudest about airplane noise in the New York City area live 12 miles from the nearest airport.

But residents of Canterbury Lane, a bucolic-sounding thoroughfare in Nassau County, say they sometimes feel as if they’re living along a Kennedy Airport runway.

They’ve logged 1,278 noise complaints to the Port Authority in the last year and a half, documents obtained from the agency show — the second highest of any neighborhood.

“They literally come directly over my house. They’re low, surprisingly low,” said Joshua Weiner, who lives on Canterbury Lane in the village of East Hills and has complained about 50 times to the PA. “It starts early in the morning. Some evenings it goes well into the 10 or 11 o’clock hour.”

Noise-sensitive citizens made 21,000 complaints to the PA about the thunderous racket of planes using its three airports from June 28, 2012, through Jan. 31, 2014.

Residents of 33rd Road in Bayside, just minutes from La Guardia Airport, complained 1,360 times. Those living close to La Guardia along Crocheron Avenue in Flushing made 686 complaints.

The PA released the complaint data in response to a Freedom of Information Law request.

Janet McEneaney, president of the advocacy group Queens Quiet Skies, said the airplanes fly over her Bayside neighborhood every 20 seconds from 6 a.m. to midnight.

“If you’ve ever had an earache or a toothache, you can’t think of anything else,” McEneaney said. “That’s what it’s like.”

She blamed a new flight pattern established in 2012 and rerouted planes to fly at lower altitudes from La Guardia.

McEneaney said she urges residents to complain to the PA, which on its Web site provides a place to log such concerns.

Michael Koblenz, the mayor of East Hills, said the PA advised people to register complaints to the agency, and the village Web site provides a link to do so. But he said all the kvetching doesn’t seem to do much good.

“We’ve been doing this for a couple of years already,” Koblenz said. “Nothing’s happened.”

The PA said it regularly passes on noise-complaint data to the Federal Aviation Administration, which controls flight routes, and is working with the FAA “to address resident noise concerns through the placement of noise monitors in and around our airports.”

In November 2013, Gov. Cuomo directed the PA to study airplane noise over Long Island. The agency said it was in the process of fulfilling the directive.

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