Mike Sperry lives by Summit Park, in the Red Mountain Ranch neighborhood just north of Loop 202 in Mesa. He said the area was appealing because it was quiet, peaceful and on the border of untouched desert. But noise from nearby Falcon Field has become unbearable, he said.
“I'll be on the phone and a plane will go over, and it's so loud I have to say, ‘Can you wait a minute until the plane passes by?’” he said.
Sperry said when he moved into his house over four years ago, planes overhead were few and far between. Now, they have become a constant.
“They're all loud, and the sound is, it's like a lawnmower, and there might be a gap of five minutes or 10 minutes sometimes between them, but sometimes it's a half an hour in a row,” Sperry said. “It never stops.”
With flight noise in mind, residents like Sperry have been closely following the Mesa City Council’s upcoming decision on implementing landing fees.
Emails to council members show a wave of support for the fees from residents who view the charges as a fix to the noise caused by planes over their neighborhoods. More than 2,300 people have signed a change.com petition asking the city to do something about the noise.
The petition raises issues with flight schools at Falcon Field, saying low-flying training aircraft have made it “increasingly difficult for residents to enjoy peace, quiet and safety in our own neighborhoods.”
Initially, the petition called for the Mesa City Council to adopt landing fees, in addition to student-training fees and noise abatement requirements for users of the airport. The petition has since been modified to drop any mention of landing fees, but more than 2,200 residents signed it before that change.
But city officials say the decision on whether to raise fees from flights at Falcon Field have nothing to do with residents’ noise complaints.
“It is solely a proposal to address the airport's financial sustainability,” Casey Blake, a spokesperson for the city of Mesa said in a statement.
Falcon Field is a general aviation airport in northeast Mesa. The airport has remained a prominent training airport since its founding in 1941, where pilots for Allied nations were trained during World War II. Since 2006, the airport has operated at a deficit off the capital from a sale of airport-owned land.
But the funding will dry up in less than two years, so the city proposed landing fees to keep the airport self-sustaining.
“The city will not use general funds to subsidize the airport,” Blake said. “This policy is intended to ensure that Mesa residents who have never set foot on the airport are not paying for aviation costs.”
In order for the airport to remain self-sustaining, the landing fees must generate at least $2.6 million in revenue, according to Blake. The landing fees range in price, but for most aircraft based at Falcon Field, it would cost around $20 per landing. Aircraft based at Falcon Field would get 10 free landings per month before landing fees apply.
What caught the attention of Mesa residents who have become increasingly frustrated with the noise generated by airport traffic are estimates, prepared by city staff, of a reduction in flights as a result of the fees.
“It is reasonable to estimate that some pilots who currently land at Falcon will choose not to or not as often,” Blake said.
The proposal before the City Council would also allow the city manager to raise fees even higher — in the event flight traffic is reduced so much that the fees don’t generate enough revenue to pay for airport operations. That, in turn, could lead to further reductions in flight traffic.
Since 2023, the number of yearly operations at Falcon Field have increased by 120,000. An operation occurs anytime a plane takes off or lands, and one flight can consist of multiple operations. Pilot training requires students to repeat touch-and-gos — a maneuver in aviation where the plane lands on a runway and takes off again without stopping. Sometimes, that’ll happen multiple times during one flight lesson, resulting in several operations.
That flight traffic bothered Sperry so much he raised the issue with the Federal Aviation Administration.
In one week this January, the FAA tracked more than 2,200 flights passing over Sperry’s house at an altitude lower than 900 feet.
“The pilot training pilots that are in the planes going around, they don't just go over once, one one plane circled our house 30 times, one plane,” Sperry said.
Sperry said if the city is not able to solve the issue, he would leave Mesa.
“We love the area, but if it's disturbing our daily life at our house, we probably would consider moving," he said.
Rick Ryall, who owns and operates Desert Wing Flight school at Falcon Field, warns the proposed fees won’t have as significant an impact on the volume of flights as the airport’s neighbors hope.
“We have two single engine and one multi-engine aircraft,” Ryall said. “So you know, if this pushes us out of business, it's not going to have any impact.”
Of all the flight schools operating at Falcon Field, Ryall estimates that only a handful of the largest schools — businesses that can afford to absorb the fees — are responsible for upwards of 80% of flight traffic.
“How much traffic that we're putting into Falcon, it's negligible, compared to, again, a handful of the large ones,” Ryall said.
For some pilots, like instructor Dakota Rice, the fees would end their personal flights in Mesa.
“I'm not gonna land in an airport with landing fees,” Rice said. “Yeah, I don't want to get charged if I need to.”
Rice said he’s concerned the landing fees will force flight traffic to airports without air traffic controllers, increasing congestion and the risk of mid-air collisions.
“It will be more dangerous to fly at those airports just because there's gonna be so many other planes flying into these smaller airports like Ak-Chin and Coolidge down south," Rice said.
Rice said residents complaining about flights should expect noise when living near an airport.
“Personally, it seems silly to me to be upset if you were to purchase a house by train tracks, if you were to get upset that there's loud trains passing by every day, you know, it's the same idea, in my opinion,” Rice said.
The Mesa City Council scheduled a vote on the proposed fee Monday evening.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been up modified to change.org petition was altered, and now only calls for city and airport officials to add student-training fees and other noise abatement requirements for pilots at Falcon Field.
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