East Hampton Town should stay the course on a long-sought change to the way its airport operates. Despite facing heat from the Federal Aviation Administration and air transport sector interests, town officials will likely temporarily close the airport at the end of this month, then reopen it in March under a new set of rules. The thought is that by doing so, the town could block certain kinds of noisy aircraft from using the facility — something that has been increasingly demanded by people from across the East End. In the town’s plan, the airport will be back in business, albeit with the new limits — on March 4. After that date, the airport would be subject to local control in what the F.A.A. calls a prior-permission-required model, in that advance clearance would be required before an aircraft landed or took off.
The F.A.A. doesn’t like it one bit. From its perspective, East Hampton Airport is part of an essential national network and should remain open to all. In a strangely indignant and personal letter to the town dated Feb. 2, an F.A.A. regional administrator warned that it could take two years, not less than a week, for the town to begin operations again if the airport is deactivated as planned.
Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc vigorously reacted to the letter by saying that for decades the town tried to address noise issues with the F.A.A., to no avail. Moreover, he said that the letter’s claim that airport procedures would have to be studied before it reopened made no sense: “There has never been a suggestion from the F.A.A. that East Hampton Airport was unsafe, that the airspace is unsafe, that the procedures are unsafe, or that the town’s privately contracted air control tower is unsafe.”
The F.A.A’s warning was echoed by a corporate helicopter group that falsely said that “roughly 80 percent” of town residents wanted to keep the airport open. This figure apparently was derived from an October mailed survey of East Hampton Village residents that was itself profoundly mischaracterized during a village board presentation in late January. A close review of each of the 574 responses showed that most who said they wanted the airport open favored noise and landing limits and some who said they wanted it closed still wanted it available for emergency use or could tolerate it with no helicopter traffic. Carefully tallied, it turned out that 63 percent of respondents were in favor of limiting airport traffic.
Next came a statement from a Colorado company with a medical-transport helicopter based on Long Island, claiming that East Hampton Airport was an “important hub” for its operations. The dates of the company or its affiliates’ recent use of East Hampton Airport were not immediately available. Throughout this debate, the use of the airport for such purposes has been overstated; most emergency flights from the South Fork are handled by Suffolk police helicopters and land as close to the victims’ locations as possible, for example, the town-owned 555 open space preserve in Amagansett or Eddie Ecker Park in Montauk. Also exaggerated was a claim on roadside signs that keeping the airport would “save 872 jobs.” We were amused to see a witty response placed along Route 114 in East Hampton that said, “Reopen Sag Harbor Whaling Create 873 Jobs.”
Judging from the tone, hyperbole, and now, lawsuits, from the opposition to meaningful change, it appears that the town’s effort to tame the airspace is on the right track. Officials should not be intimidated by all their noise.