Bird's eye view
3-5-05 On Saturday, March 5 the Agua Dulce Airport tried to demonstrate that large turbo driven aircraft are as quiet as smaller piston driven aircraft. How did the Airport try to accomplish this counterintuitive task?
First they brought in a B200 turbo-jet Kingair from Mesa, Arizona flown by a pretty good pilot. Apparently, no local B200 planes or pilots could be found skilled enough to fly this plane quietly into our little local airport.
They made sure that this 11 passenger airplane had no passengers and a near empty fuel tank to lighten the load. The lighter the airplane, the steeper the take-off can be, thus resulting in a much higher altitude when the plane flys over the house a quarter mile from the end of the runway that has the decibel meter.
Remember that sounds diminish with the square of the distance from the noise source, so the higher the plane is, the quieter it is. We know the gas tank was near empty, because later that afternoon the jet A fuel truck took over 15 minutes to refill the empty tanks.
When the B200 landed, it made sure to use it's brakes and only it's brakes: the prop pitch was not changed to assist in deceleration. When a B200 changes propeller pitch, this creates a tremendous noise and also raises up much dust.
Will a B200 with 11 real passengers, a less skilled pilot and a fuller tank be able to stop in the summer time by just using brakes? Probably not!!! You will hear the noise then, but the Commissioners will not.
Then they flew six smaller piston driven airplanes, so the Planning Commissioners could see how noisy they are. The airport made a concerted effort to pick some of the loudest small planes that they could. In addition these planes did not appear to take-off at much of an angle. This resulted in these planes flying inordinately close to the neighboring house than they are capable of.
In addition the planes did not fly the designated approach pattern to runway 22, but instead flew over or very near the house on the east end of the runway where the commissioner were observing from.
Did these ploys work? One County employee was overheard asking if it was always this noisy? It seems that this demonstration only proved that not only are B200 turbo-jets loud, but also the “normal” aircraft are annoying to this quiet community.
The person running the decibel meter commented how low the ambient noise is in Agua Dulce when planes are not flying. The Airport was again caught trying to deceive the public. This time it was in the presence of our Planning Commission.
One only needs look at Aircraft Noise Levels (published by the FAA) to see that the larger the airplane, the more noise tends to be generated. There are many exceptions to this: there are Airbus A320 and Boeing 717 configurations that are rated as quieter on take-off than the B200 the Airport demonstrated. I would not recommend any Airbus or Boeing planes for our local airport nor would I recommend any 12,500-pound twin-turbo jets either.
I hope the tested B200 turbo-jet has a happy life in Arizona and stays away from Agua Dulce. It's too bad that the airport could not have flown some of the quieter planes based at the airport that day.
It really is unfortunate that our local airport has shot themselves in the foot once again. I'm afraid that the Planning Commission's only option now is to revoke the operating permit of this airport. This airport has consistently failed to obey County, State and Federal operating laws, rules and regulations.
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