Airport authority votes for curfew study

BURBANK — The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority Commission voted unanimously Monday in favor of a study it will use to support Bob Hope Airport’s application for a curfew on nighttime flights.

After eight years and $6 million spent on the Part 161 study, the approval by the nine-member commission was the final step in completing the first study of its kind since the process was legalized by Congress in 1991. The Federal Aviation Administration will now have one month to accept the study and six months to make a ruling on it, said Bob Hope Airport spokesman Victor Gill.

“You can tell by the fact that it took us eight years and $6 million what an arduous task this is,” Gill said. “Getting the paper off to the FAA was an amazing gauntlet to run. Now the baton has been passed to them and we’ll have to wait for their decision. The biggest hurdle to all of this is getting the FAA’s approval in the first place.”

Commissioned by Bob Hope Airport in 2000 due to insistence from the surrounding neighborhood to decrease noise pollution, the study compiles data on why a ban on flights between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. would be cost-effective and practical.

Initiating such a curfew would save the airport an estimated $67 million over 10 years, according to the study. The next step for the Jacobs Consultancy, which completed the study, is public outreach about the findings, Gill said.

“There are around 200,000 people in the Los Angeles portions of the Valley who hear the planes when they fly overhead,” Gill said. “We want them to know that we’ve used every avenue and gone 100% and beyond in pursuit of this curfew. Other airports have tried these studies but eventually abandoned them before completion.”

While Bob Hope Airport’s study argues the case to curfew quieter jets made in the 1980s, Van Nuys Regional Airport is compiling its own Part 161 Study to ban older, noisier jets, Gill said. If the FAA does not rule favorably on Bob Hope’s study, that would bring the issue of a nighttime curfew to a standstill in Burbank.

“I hope to be able to support the package of Part 161 studies from Burbank and Van Nuys and recognize that the Valley’s two neighborhood airports are not appropriate venues for flights between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.,” Rep. Brad Sherman said.

If the FAA does recognize and subsequently rule in favor of the study, then the curfew proposal would be reviewed against the California Environmental Quality Act for any environmental consequences. Gill expects the study is thorough enough that environmental review would not take too long before a final ruling on the curfew.