Mesa residents irked by Sky Harbor flights

While most people wake up to alarm clocks and some even roosters, Mesa resident Dick Page said he's stirred from bed by a different bird. Early each morning, a commercial airplane screeches over his house at 5 a.m.

"Like clockwork," he said Tuesday at a meeting of Las Sendas residents to discuss the rising problem. "I don't have to get an alarm clock, because of the planes."

There is no doubt that Mesa is at the crossroads of three busy airports - Falcon Field, Phoenix Sky Harbor International and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway - but while some residents are crying out over the confluence of noise, their voice is not being heard in Phoenix.

To date, Sky Harbor does not have a noise abatement program that effects Mesa because the city was thought to be too far away when the plans were drawn almost a decade ago.

Residents of Page's community in northeast Mesa invited their council member, Dina Higgins, to the Tuesday night meeting in a way to garner a voice.

Higgins said she would convey the concerns of residents, especially in light of the increased frequency of flights.

"If they're lining up over your neighborhood, they shouldn't," she said of the commercial airplanes bound for Sky Harbor.

Mesa has long attempted to be a factor when it came to the busy international airport to the west, particularly when the airport was revamping its boundaries a couple years ago.

Then-Mayor Keno Hawker wrote a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration dated April 2007 warning the agency that regulation to lower the elevation of private planes to make a buffer for the commercial planes flying into Phoenix overhead would cause headaches for his residents.

"... The city is requesting that the FAA continue to recognize the area's reliever airports, including Falcon Field, and the significant role that they play in reducing air traffic congestion so that Sky Harbor can focus on commercial airline traffic," Hawker wrote. "The airspace needs of the reliever airports should also be considered and integrated into the modification."

Changes made in 2007 did lower the ceiling for Falcon Field Airport and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport private pilots, but only as a safety measure, said FAA spokesman Ian Gregor.

He said the FAA implemented an airspace redesign in 2007.

"It didn't change any altitudes or routes for commercial planes," Gregor said, directly addressing rumors that commercial planes were flying lower over Mesa these days. "All it did was increase the buffer zone around commercial airways to the east, which would put private pilots lower over Mesa."

In 2009, the frequency of flights over Mesa headed for Sky Harbor increased because of nationwide changes requiring that airports utilize more approaches to free up congestion.

"The general arrival flow into Phoenix is east or west," Gregor said. "Nationwide, we relieved this conflict of planes flying directly at each other to reduce potential for incidents.

"We've since reduced the number of flights, but nonetheless, Mesa residents today are seeing more flights than in December 2008," Gregor said.

Higgins met with residents at the Las Sendas Community Center on Tuesday night to address concerns of those who say they have no voice when it comes to planes headed for Phoenix.

At issue: Sky Harbor presently has no noise abatement program for Mesa, only for neighboring Tempe and Phoenix.

Higgins said gaining a voice in the noise abatement process was atop her to-do list.

"That's something we have to look into, and I don't know if they figured we're so far away so we don't matter, or what," Higgins said just hours before her scheduled meeting.

A week ago, she met with residents of another neighborhood in her district over the same subject: increase in the noise over Mesa rooted to Sky Harbor.

Higgins said that with Sky Harbor reportedly having 3,000 flights a day and 500,000 a year, she wanted to address the tremors over the noise experienced by her district.

She stopped short of saying that there was a high frequency of complaints, though.

"We're 25 minutes away from the airport, easy," Higgins said. "We see some noise ... but most of it's from the airports in our city."

Still, she was resolved to listen to the complaints of residents regarding Phoenix's behemoth airport because currently, her ears are the only ones bent to their concerns, however infrequent they may be.

"If there is something they can do, we should look into that," she said.

Alisa Smith, a spokeswoman for Sky Harbor, said her airport didn't decide who the noise abatement program would serve.

"Mesa does not fall into the boundaries to be impacted by our noise abatement program," she said of the zones that are carved out by the federal government and not local airports.

Smith said that in 2001, a study was conducted and, at that time, the areas impacted by noise were thought to be Tempe and Phoenix, not Mesa.

Smith also pointed to Sky Harbor's two neighbors to the east.

"Flights in that area may or may not be related to Sky Harbor; they could be from other airports that are in that area," she said.

Smith deferred to the FAA on all questions that concerned the flight patterns, altitudes and bearings of commercial planes because she said they controlled the sky, and the city only controlled the land.

Higgins said she already sent a letter to the FAA and she will attempt to work with Sky Harbor to resolve some of the unheard concerns of residents in her district.

In the interim, northeast Mesa resident Bill Merchant said he, too, was in no need of an alarm clock any time soon.

"The first plane flies over my house at 4 a.m. - sometimes 3:50," he said of the increased commercial flights bound for Sky Harbor. "And they keep coming until 11 p.m."