South Mission Beach suffers under flight path shift

Planes leaving Lindbergh Field go just north of Ocean Beach

Author

By Gary Wonacott

Publish Date

Jan. 25, 2021

Lowest line represents departures over Ocean Beach. Middle line depicts nighttime noise abatement departure over the jetty. Upper line shows departures over South Mission Beach. In 1979, all of the departures between 10 pm and 6:30 am were moved from lowest line to the middle line. Recently the upper line was implemented that concentrated the departures over South Mission Beach.

In 1979, the City and the Port Commission approved a noise abatement measure that moved all of the post-10 pm departures leaving Lindbergh Field from Ocean Beach to Mission Beach in a letter of agreement. There was no environmental assessment performed by the FAA, which was required even then to ensure that noise was not being moved from one community to another.

In 2017, the FAA implemented the NexGen satellite navigation program, which focused all of the departures previously fanned out over Mission Beach on to a narrow corridor in South Mission Beach. Now in an effort to make legitimate the 1979 letter of agreement, the Airport Authority Noise Abatement Office is performing studies that will eliminate the 1979 letter and move all of the post-10 pm departures to the South Mission corridor.

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What is particularly alarming is that the Noise Abatement Office consultants have faked the input data to the computer model to in an attempt to justify a quarter mile shift of the aircraft north over South Mission. And there is substantial data analysis performed by a Mission Beach and a La Jolla resident that quantifies the misrepresentations in the Noise Abatement Office consultants' flawed assumptions.

There are solutions to all of the noise issues that were proposed in 2017 that would move the South Mission Beach track south the quarter mile to align with the 1979 letter, which shows a very small shift in the flight path that surrounds the airport. While the FAA has no shift policy that would preclude this move, representatives from Ocean Beach cried foul while the less technical representative from Mission Beach sat silent.

Efforts have been made to push the Airport Authority to make public the flawed analysis assumptions, but in spite of violating their due diligence mandate on FAA financially supported noise studies, the Airport Authority has effectively stone-walled the issue. In February, the new illegal procedures will be presented to the Airport Noise Advisory Committee for approval to move forward to the FAA portal for final acceptance. The increased noise from the flights over South Mission has resulted in the number of noise complaints to the Airport Authority from Mission Beach residents increasing from just a few to 3,000-5,000 each quarter. If the proposed new nighttime procedures are codified, then everyone living in South Mission Beach can be expect to be awake from 10 pm to 11:30 pm nightly.