Residents take up grass-roots effort to combat plane noise

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Sid Krimsky, a retired engineer and a West Hempstead resident, doesn’t want to complain about aircraft noise — he really doesn’t. He understands that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has much bigger fish to fry, and just wants to focus on solutions that will help mitigate the noise.

Elaine Miller, a Lynbrook school district teacher and a Malverne resident, is also concerned about plane noise, and wants to contact people who also feel passionate about the issue and explain what needs to be done to fight the Federal Aviation Administration.

The two are part of a grass-roots organization called PlaneSense4LI, spearheaded by North Hempstead resident Frances Gould and Miller, who met several years ago at a meeting of the Town of Hempstead’s Town and Village Aircraft Safety and Noise Abatement Committee meeting. After attending the meetings, however, they decided they really needed to start a group of their own. “We thought the TVASNAC committee wasn’t doing enough,” Miller said, “and we’ve grown to over 200 people now.”

Miller, who grew up in Lynbrook and moved to Malverne 20 years ago, said that she had never experienced such frequent aircraft noise in the area, and felt she had to act. “I started to collect data on the amount of planes that flew over my home at any given time,” Miller said. “I started late spring of last year, and there was no change in the pattern that the planes flew in, so the whole idea of wind and weather affecting plane patterns is not true. I could have up to over 300 planes in one day. My average would be 186 planes a day.”

Miller said that the Federal Aviation Administration told her it could not change the planes’ flight patterns because of the weather. “They picked one path and continued to use it again and again and again,” she said. “I had planes flying over my house from 5 in the morning till 2 in the morning. You cannot sleep. The roar of those engines, the high-pitched sounds that come in … It’s like a highway in the sky.”

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