Living under a flight path

I’m staying at my parents place in Long Island. Most of Long Island, and Queens, and Brooklyn are under some sort of flight path depending on the year, the weather, and whether they are playing tennis or not.

Well, as of a few hours ago, something must have changed, and now the flight path for some airport (probably JFK) is now over my parent’s house. A plane roars by about 90 seconds or so. They’re so close, that I can hear them power the engines back up just a bit so that they maintain above stall speed on the approach to the runway. And it’s 11:30pm.

Now I understand why the citizens of San Jose mandate that SJC not allow planes of a certain noise threshold to land after 11pm (though I continue to disagree with it as a frequent flier on the frequently late Alaska Airlines.)

As a sidebar, I guess the policies around SJC are still fantastic compared to the policies around SNA (John Wayne) which have created this interesting takeoff situation for pilots:

it is not the start of the takeoff that we don’t like. Holding the brakes and spooling up is no big. It is the deep cutback at a few hundred feet in the air to a power setting that gives us only about 50 feet per minute rate of climb that is not right. It is wallowing out across the coastline through all the Wichita flak in a nose-high attitude with no maneuvering speed and neither pilot giving full attention to traffic spotting that is unsafe.

If there is, no, make that when there is a midair, the pilots will be blamed for “failure to see and avoid” the traffic. Make no mistake though, the real cause will be the spoiled thousandaires (real millionaires don’t live there) who can’t decided which they hate more - jet noise or driving to LAX, and it will be the politically motivated airport manager and it will be the greed of the airline management whose chief pilot’s rubber-stamp approval of a stupid procedure that will be to blame. And it is coming.

As I said in my first post, I believe that it has gotten better. If I’m not mistaken we no longer cut back below climb power. It has always been hard to believe that a jet at any power setting only two thousand feet above your house could be quieter than one at seven or eight thousand feet and climb power on a normal profile.

Yipes.