Residents of Phoenix neighborhoods impacted by the Federal Aviation Administration’s flight path changes at Sky Harbor Airport are stuck in a holding pattern, despite efforts to mitigate the problem.
For more than six months, the city has been trying to fix the unintended consequences of those changes, specifically the noise. The city hired an outside firm to monitor the noise levels. The results of that study led the city to amend its legal protest with the FAA.
"This gives us that objective criteria now that we can use in our discussions with the FAA to show these flights are actually interfering with speech and they're certainly above the background noise level, as it was characterized by the FAA that they would not be, so this is very helpful to us," said Chad Makovsky with Sky Harbor.
While progress is slow, many residents and city officials remain hopeful the FAA will revert back to the original flight paths or modify the current ones.
