Chopper Noise: Squadron Responds to Reader Complaint

Brooklyn Heights Blog

by Claude Scales on 24. Mar, 2011

BHB reader drewb, who has frequently and helpfully commented on the helicopter noise problem, wrote to State Senator Daniel Squadron, and has received a reply which provides useful information and a guide to making effective complaints. The full text of the letter follows the jump.

Thank you for contacting me regarding helicopter traffic over Brooklyn Bridge Park and Brooklyn Heights. I appreciate your vigilance in alerting us about ongoing helicopter concerns, so that we can continue to push for more effective rules and better enforcement.

I contacted the City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) about the concerns raised in your letter, including your concern about helicopters over Buttermilk Channel. As you are aware, I have been pushing hard for protection from helicopter noise, including working to implement new restrictions on tourist flights, creating a 311 protocol that allows the community to effectively track complaints and pushing for an enforcement tool that gives teeth to the new rules.

In your letter you ask several important questions that I address below:

1) Isn’t flying over Brooklyn piers a violation of the agreed flight path? The protocol I helped create last spring prohibits tourist flights over Brooklyn altogether, as well as prohibiting noisy “short flights” and establishing specific paths over the Hudson River that tourist flights must take. More recently, the City established a new tourist flight path over Buttermilk Channel, between Governors Island and Brooklyn. Based on your letter, we are raising concerns about this flight path with EDC. If they were flights over Piers 5 and 6, that would be a violation of the restrictions we imposed, as tourist helicopters are at no point allowed to fly over the parkland.

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