BOSTON — Frank Kerr looks off his brother’s back deck towards Boston and Logan Airport as a dark object rises into the gray sky then turns south, its trajectory taking it directly over the neighborhood he also calls home.
“This one’s coming from 22R,” he said.
That would be Runway 22 Right at Logan International which, on this cloudy, warm December day, is seeing a significant amount of action. Every couple of minutes another twin-engine jet flies the same route south before branching off in whatever direction its destination requires.
It didn’t use to be this way.
“We woke up one day and said, ‘what’s that and why are planes continuing to go over the house,’” Kerr recalled.
The answer, he learned, was that Logan had begun switching over to a new method of guiding airliners in and out of the field. Called ‘NextGen,’ it funneled planes down narrow corridors. Which was fine, unless you lived under one of those corridors.
“That became a problem because people started hearing the planes coming sometimes every minute for hours,” Kerr said. “And it would make you crazy. It’s like a Chinese water torture.”
Kerr said on the worst days, TVs would have to be turned up and voices raised.
His neighbor, Lori Tobin, agrees.
“We have a porch here,” she said. “And we sometimes sit out in the summer and have dinner. And you have to stop talking because the noise is so loud.”
Kerr and others formed a group to convince the FAA to move the flight paths more over the water. After years of trying, Hull Neighbors for Quiet Skies could finally declare a measure of victory Thursday. The FAA announced aircraft departing from Runway 15 Right will no longer barrel directly towards Hull and then over it before heading over the Atlantic Ocean.
Instead, beginning Thursday, departing planes will be required to make a tighter turn north away from the coast. On December 30, arriving aircraft to Runway 33 Left, which now flies directly over Hull, will be re-routed over the water. Kerr said a slight change in path is also coming for departures off of 22 Right.
“We know we’re not going to be able to go back to the way it used to be,” Kerr said. “We’ll accept whatever we can get.”
And Kerr said Hull is fortunate to be on the water, the only thing that made changing the flight paths feasible. Other communities with similar complaints face a bigger, even impossible, challenge, trying to get the planes to go somewhere else.
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