Meeting tackles airplane noise in the Parkway

Airplane noise used to be a problem for East Boston residents, not for the Parkway neighborhoods.

However, that has not been the case for some time.

“A lot of people are upset about it, and rightfully so,” said Larry Costello, president of the West Roxbury Neighborhood Council.

“A guy … had a new baby. The airplanes were waking him up in the morning,” Costello said about a telephone call from a concerned resident during a WRNC meeting at the Area E Police Station in West Roxbury last Tuesday.

To address this ongoing problem, Congressman Stephen Lynch will be holding a public forum about the increased noise at 7 p.m. on Dec. 3 at Milton High School, located at 25 Gile Road in Milton. The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates all air traffic, will be present and answer questions about the increased noise.

Not everybody is complaining, however.

“It seems like it’s always the same,” said West Roxbury resident Bob MacTaggart after the meeting was over. “I think we just get used to it.”

The increased noise level in new neighborhoods is because the FAA has recently started tests at Boston Logan Airport to see if they can, “share the noise more equitably,” according to Costello.

The tests are in response to complaints from local Boston neighborhoods, according to Costello.

The FAA is “trying to have different runway configurations during different times of the day” to lessen the noise, Costello said. By changing the configuration, airplanes are flying over different neighborhoods, such as West Roxbury, Milton, Belmont, Roslindale, and Hyde Park.

The noise level for people in the new neighborhoods like Milton are going from very little, for example, 1 percent, to an increased level of 15 percent, said Costello. Naturally, residents feel like their noise level is tripling.

“It’s about what they’re used to,” said Costello.

Meanwhile, neighborhoods that used to have noise 40 percent of the time, for example, are going down to 25 percent.

“The issue is, when you decrease for one (neighborhood), you increase for the other,” he added, comparing the changes in runway configuration to squeezing one part of a balloon only to have the air fill up another part.

Costello is West Roxbury’s representative to the Logan Airport Community Advisory Council. The council goes back to the ’70s and was created to help “minimize the impact of Logan Airport, which is primarily noise,” Costello said.

There are representatives from over 35 neighborhoods on the council.

Right now, the FAA is not even sure it will be able to finish testing new runway configurations due to funding issues, Costello said.

That makes discussions about what to do about the new configurations almost moot, since they may not even be adopted, Costello said.

Costello cautioned that the Dec. 3 meeting will be mainly an informational one, and some residents may feel like they’re “banging their head against a wall,” in part because the FAA is mostly concerned about safety over noise, Costello said.

That is, if the FAA is weighing a noise issue against a safety issue, the FAA would likely not side on decreasing the noise.

In addition, various other factors are at play in trying to mitigate noise levels.

Logan is planning to expand Terminal E, its international terminal, which will lead to more airplane traffic, Costello said.

In addition, new GPS location technology currently being implemented will allow planes to more accurately follow their flight paths, according to Costello. Previous flights which sometimes veered a mile or two off course on their way home are now more accurately sticking to the paths, creating additional noise burdens for the communities directly under the planes.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better, in my opinion,” said Costello.

Economic and environmental considerations also come into play. Flights are rated on fuel consumption and on-time arrival, Costello said. If it costs more fuel in order to prevent noise, the rating for the flight might go down because it costs more money and leads to more pollution.

“It’s complicated,” Costello said.

One piece of good news is that Logan has been successful in recent years in rerouting some flights over the water where it doesn’t bother anybody, according to Costello.

“Get there 30 minutes early,” he added about the Dec. 3 meeting. “I think it’s going to be jam-packed.”