A new noise budget analysis completed at Long Beach Airport has determined that no new flights will be allowed under the city’s noise ordinance despite an abnormally quiet year surrounding the airport.
The annual report is conducted by the city to see if the cumulative amount of noise generated by airline activity at Long Beach has either created room for additional future flights or if previously awarded supplemental flight slots need to be taken away to keep the city in compliance with its strict local noise ordinance.
A memo from the city’s airport director to the city manager released Dec. 1 said the city should not increase the amount of supplemental flight slots this year.
Since 2015, this process has resulted in 12 supplemental flights slots being added to the 41 minimum flights the airport can operate under that ordinance. However, this year’s report was complicated by the pandemic’s gutting of the airline industry with fewer people flying, leading airlines to scale back the number of flights offered nationwide.
The dip in flight activity and the fullness of those flights both factored into the recommendation not to add additional supplemental flight slots for the next fiscal year. The airport is currently allowed to operate 53 daily flights but only averaged 29.6 flights per day through Sept. 30.
Last December the report resulted in three additional slots being offered to airlines operating out of Long Beach. The city has previously said that the phasing out of older, louder aircraft have allowed for the additional slots to be created.
The incomplete picture presented in this year’s data led to the city’s consultant to advise against adding new flights, with an analyst saying in a letter to the city attorney’s office that the data was unreliable.
“This year is so discordant with previous years that it would be very risky to extrapolate the current data to a normal year,” said Vicent Mestre, an analyst from Mestre Greve Associates, which carried out the noise analysis.
While flight activity is down, the composition of the airport could also factor into noise levels going forward. This year, Texas-based Southwest Airlines replaced JetBlue Airways as the airport’s main tenant after JetBlue announced it would no longer fly out of Long Beach and Southwest claimed all 17 slots previously occupied by JetBlue.
JetBlue was based in New York and routinely offered flights to the East Coast, something that has been uncommon thus far with Southwest. Mestre pointed out in his letter to the city that not only do the number of passengers affect the amount of noise created by a plane, but also the amount of fuel it’s carrying.
“A flight of 2,000 miles carries substantially more fuel that a flight of 250 miles,” he said.
As the prospect of a vaccine has raised hopes that life could largely return to normal at some point in 2021, it’s unclear how quickly airline traffic at Long Beach will return to its permitted daily flights of 53.
If any additional flights were to be added at Long Beach, it might not be until the next full year of airline traffic can be analyzed, which could likely be the fiscal year starting in October 2021.