Mike Wheat lives in Hawaiian Paradise Park, a rural subdivision south of Hilo. On days when helicopter traffic is especially heavy; he says flights over his house can be as frequent as every five minutes. The pilots often fly at tree-top level, giving their passengers a view of the signs Wheat has placed in his yard, imploring them to go away. Far from the signs achieving their intended effect, Wheat says, they have made his yard a “must” on helicopter tours.
For Wheat, who suffers from a terminal illness, the noise of the frequent, low overflights is more than a nuisance. He says it often causes him nightmarish headaches. “I’m angry from years of flights over my house,” he told U.S. Representative Patsy Mink at a meeting she called in Hilo to address the problem last month. “I’m disgusted. I’m asking for your help.”
For Rene Siracusa, the noisy helicopters flying over her Pahoa house are more than a bother: they have caused her material loss. Siracusa told Mink that she had lost income and livestock as a result of stampeding brought on by the helicopter traffic. “I have been unable to receive compensation for these because of the legal obstacles to aircraft identification,” she said.
Siracusa also accused the operators of voyeurism. Until she had indoor plumbing installed, Siracusa took her daily bath outdoors in mid-afternoon (giving the water time to heat). The “nude lady in the tub became a big operator draw,” she reported earlier at a March 1,1993, meeting of community members with FAA officials. Because she could never read the numbers on the offending helicopters’ under-sides, no enforcement actions were ever taken to penalize the guilty operators.
The helicopter operators’ invasion of privacy was an issue that came up repeatedly. A woman told the panel that her house in Pu’ueo, not on the way to any particular scenic spot, had apparently become a destination in its own right for some tour operators. Family gatherings were disrupted as well as private moments with her husband. On one occasion, she said, helicopters “hovered for as long as it took us to put on our clothes.”
David Sheehan of Laupahoehoe noted that there are more restrictions on boom boxes than on helicopters. Our rights to privacy and quiet are revocable at any moment.
The complaining public had no lockhold on the high ground of “rights.” In what might be regarded as an awesome broadening of the grammar of constitutionally protected behavior, helicopter operators testifying before Mink championed the rights of their clients to travel anywhere their helicopters could fly.
Dave Chevalier of Blue Hawaiian Helicopters stated that 90 percent of the flights on Maui carry visitors to Haleakala. “I don’t want to deny visitors their right to see Haleakala,” he said.
An employee of Blue Hawaiian – Jim Spin- told Mink, “you are messing with my rights if you interfere with the right to see my park. And you’re messing with all the tourists’ rights also, since Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park’s a world heritage park – you’re messing with the world’s right if you restrict flights over the park.”
Jim Hennessey who flies with Papillon Helicopters, defended the notion of “equal access” to national parks in Hawai’i. “The old, the ill, the handicapped and those short of time will be discriminated against” if Mink’s legislation, H.R. 1696, is passed, he warned.
David Leese lives in the Haiku area of Maui. The problem there, he told Mink, is just as bad. Between 20 and 40 helicopters a day pass over his house on Maui’s north shore. The flight-seeing industry’s growth has been unregulated, he told Mink, with no attention paid to its impact on people or birds. It was time, he said, for the Federal Aviation Administration to turn from the promotion of the industry to its regulation.
Just how much the FAA can regulate to control noise is a matter of some dispute. FAA spokesmen have stated that their mandate goes only as far as safety issues are concerned; noise generated by operators who are in compliance with all safety regulations is beyond their regulatory authority they say.
To hear the testimony of people living in the helicopters’ paths, however, the helicopter pilots who are the source of the greatest annoyance are often seen to be in obvious violation of FAA flight rules. They may be scudding along at tree-top level, hovering over flows of red-hot lava, or flying over open ocean too far out to allow them to land safely in the event of mechanical failure. In those cases, the pilot would be violating FAA rules by flying outside what is called the helicopter’s flight envelope the space required to allow a helicopter to land safely, given its speed and altitude.
In fact, once a helicopter leaves the controlled airspace of a public airport, about the only FAA regulation that applies to the pilot’s activities in flight is the one concerning the flight envelope. The minimum altitudes that fixed-wing aircraft must observe do not apply to helicopter operators. Jim Kane, a resident of Waipi’o Valley, reported to Mink that when he complained to a helicopter operator about the noise flights were generating – because of Waipio’s amphitheater shape, sounds reverberate – the operator stated that “he could fly anywhere he wanted – he could fly two feet above the ground all the way to the back of Waipi’o Valley, if he wanted” Given the present FAA regulations, the operator is correct.
If a helicopter is observed in violation of safe operating regulations, the FAA says, it wants to hear about it. According to Steve Badger, an FAA employee who heads up a new Air Tour Surveillance Team established for Hawai’i, the FAA can and will enforce. David Gilliam, the manager for flight standards of the FAA’s Western Region, expressed the same sentiment even more vehemently at Mink’s meeting: “Where we find non-compliance we’ll aggressively follow up on that.”
All that they to do this is for the complaining members of the public to provide them with the date, time and place of violation -and the helicopter’s identification number.
For years, the public has been providing date, time and place to the FAA and to a hotline set up by the Hawai’i Helicopter Operators Association, which has promised to try to get its members to abide by a “fly neighborly” program. But providing the identification number is trickier. All the numbers begin with “N” (for number). Thereafter is a long sequence of numerals all but impossible to read as the helicopter whizzes by. Reading the identification is made even more difficult by the fact that usually the helicopter is silhouetted against a bright sky.
At the April 1 meeting called by Mink, many of those testifying complained about the difficulty they had reading the identification numbers and asked the FAA to require larger letters and numbers as well as a simpler identification system – perhaps starting with a three letter abbreviation for each helicopter operator. Mink asked FAA officials to explain the present rules on helicopter identification. George Harvey, special assistant to the regional administrator of the FAA’s Western Region, took on the task.
The FAA originally required identifying letters and numerals to be 12 inches high, Harvey said, but then the FAA’s rule changed so that the identifying marks needed to be no higher than three inches. “Now the FAA requires 12-inch-high letters and numbers,” Harvey said, but added that the requirement goes into effect only when operators repaint their helicopters. Harvey’s explanation drew a chorus of boos from the audience.
Mink was told repeatedly of the economic benefit tour helicopters bring. Dave Chevalier of Blue Hawaiian Helicopters said that on Maui, 200 people are employed in the helicopter tour business, which he said added $18 million to the state’s economy last year. On the Big Island, 150 people were reported to be employed by the tour helicopter industry.
To many of those who must put up with the noise, the operators profits have come at their expense. Coco Pierson may have expressed the thought most succinctly. He told Mink: “My tranquility was stolen, and somehow it reappeared as money in the pocket of the tour operators.”
Volume 3, Number 11 May 1993
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