Long Beach Airport officials are recommending against adding any new commercial flight slots at the facility in the coming year despite its annual noise analysis showing that last year’s operations were below the allowable limits.
A memo from Long Beach Airport Director Cynthia Guidry to the City Council last week said that airlines still trying to recover from COVID-19, crew shortages and aircraft availability led to the airport averaging about 43 flights per day in 2023, well short of the 58 daily flights it has allocated.
Guidry said that the data indicated that if all 58 commercial flight slots had been used daily, the amount of noise generated would be just below the current allowable limit.
“It is also very difficult to extrapolate the current data to predict future noise levels due to the relatively low number of operations as compared to the maximum allowable,” Guidry wrote before saying that airport staff was not recommending any changes to the number of flight slots.
The annual noise budget analysis has seen the airport add several flights over the past few years. The airport is required by law to allow a minimum of 41 daily flight slots but it has added 17 supplemental slots through the noise analysis process with Southwest Airlines claiming the most (50) of any operator at Long Beach Airport.
Airport officials have previously said that a combination of quieter planes and the departure of JetBlue Airlines, which had repeatedly violated the airport’s noise curfews with late-night flights, have been contributing factors.
Aside from industry-wide pilot shortages, a winter storm in 2022 that was followed by the failure of Southwest’s scheduling software and a historic tropical storm that hit Long Beach in August led to massive cancelations at Long Beach during the year that was analyzed for the report.
The report does not look at small aircraft noise like general aviation operations that account for hundreds of thousands of takeoffs and landings at Long Beach Airport each year.
Earlier this year, residents mobilized to demand the city do something to rein in noise generated by those smaller planes, but a memo from Guidry in late October said the airport’s options were limited because it accepts federal grant money, which prohibits policies that produce “unjust discrimination” against certain users at the airport.