The tiny red and white button was a convenient way to register her annoyance with the governing bodies of Burbank and Van Nuys airports as she began to notice more airplanes flying above their Studio City hills home.
Almost a year later, Allen sleeps beside the Airnoise button to complain every time she gets woken up at 3, 4 in the morning by a private jet. Then she’ll use the Airnoise app, sending around 100 gripes over the course of the day about commercial and passenger planes from her iPhone.
“We built our dream house and we can’t enjoy it,” she said from her backyard equipped with an infinity pool overlooking the San Fernando Valley Thursday, reflexively tapping in a complaint as she hears a plane approach.
The never-ending din of whines and roars, she says, has made her anxious, depressed and ready to move out.
Allen is one of over a 1,000 people in south San Fernando Valley communities, predominately Studio City, who are using Airnoise to register their frustration about a southward shift in departure routes coming out of Hollywood Burbank and Van Nuys airports.
Airnoise is a third-party app, button and website designed by a La Jolla software engineer to circumnavigate clunky and time-consuming airport authority complaint-filing systems. With one click, it uses publicly available flight information to locate the nearest plane and send the respective authority a detailed complaint.
Since June 2018, 1,444,359 complaints have been filed in the Valley on planes coming in and out of Burbank and Van Nuys airports — a number that goes up by several thousand every day and has overwhelmed their systems with massive jumps in complaints. Around 200 people have a physical button, and the rest use the app or website.
Yet the million-plus grievances have done little to stem the tide of airplane noise, and airport authorities brush them off as too vast to analyze, error-filled and or even feckless. Meanwhile, homeowners keep clicking in complaints — hour by hour and minute by minute — to keep records for a potential future lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Agency and fleeting feelings of triumph against it.
The long game
Across the country, leafy and predominately affluent communities that were accustomed to seeing an occasional stray plane now find themselves underneath concentrated sky highways — thanks in part to a national modernization overhaul by the Federal Aviation Administration called Metroplex.
A recent Department of Transportation report on the nationwide Metroplex program, which was designed to implement GPS-driven procedures, increase efficiency and conserve fuel, said that community noise concerns are contributing to delays in program implementation from Florida to Las Vegas.
In the Valley, departure routes from Burbank and Van Nuys airports have shifted further south, past the 101 freeway and closer to the hills. The planes are lower and louder too, residents have alleged, sparking months of emotional appeals for relief and grassroots activism to fight dipping property values and diminished air quality.
Since the dust-up began, FAA and Burbank Airport have maintained that they did not make any modifications to the departure routes that would provoke these changes. But an analysis conducted last year by aviation planning company Landrum & Brown wrote that the implementation of Mextroplex in March 2017 is to blame in part.
It also cited increasing average temperatures, which make it harder for planes to quickly gain elevation, and a thriving aviation industry.
Click of a button
According to figures from the Hollywood Burbank Airport, the local aviation hub saw a massive jump in the number of noise complaints per year as well as a significant increase in the number of individuals filing complaints.
Some 1,300 total complaints were filed in 2017 by 261 people. Last year, that leaped to over 222,000 complaints by 681 people. And this year, the airport has received over 600,000 complaints by over 1,200 people.
The spike is mainly thanks to Airnoise.io. It’s the brainchild of Chris McCann, who repurposed the plastic Dash Button used by Amazon customers to order toilet paper and detergent to empower mostly suburban homeowners afflicted by airplane noise. “Airnoise makes your voice heard over the roar,” reads a website tagline.
He created the software to help people in San Diego going through a similar situation file complaints without spending hours in traditional airport complaint systems. When users press a button, his app locates the nearest plane using public air traffic data and sends a complaint directly to airport authority systems with the operating airline, elevation and other details.
The buttons cost $24 a pop, powering 3,000 complaints before dying or requiring a battery change. A subscription to the website costs $5 a month, and comes with a weekly data report. McCann said he simply sought to cover costs when he started the venture, and now cuts a modest profit.
Effects of this southward shift and narrowing of routes are being felt differently in households south of Burbank and Van Nuys Airports. Some Valley Village and North Hollywood residents have arrived at meetings to say things have gotten quieter.
But on the front porch of David Kimball and Marykate Harris’ town home, you have to raise your voice to be heard over the roar of a commercial aircraft every few minutes. Even after installing sound-blocking inserts on the windows, they were looking at potential new houses on a recent trip to Oregon.
Back at Michelle Allen’s home in the Studio City hills, the whine of large passenger jets seem to echo as they ricochet off canyon walls. She’s tried meditation, weighted blankets, earplugs and a sound machine. Maybe she’ll miss an aircraft or two in the shower, but these days she files some 800 complaints a week.
“Doing this feels at least like I’m doing something and not just going crazy, like I’m being proactive. But I’m being chipped away at — my sanity, my sleep. I snap at my kids more than I should,” said Allen.
Where complaints go to die
“The key is who’s complaining, not the person sitting at home making 2,000 complaints,” said FAA Western-Pacific Regional Office spokesperson Ian Gregor from the air traffic control tower at Burbank Airport. The task force, he said, is where individual residents can have their voice heard.
The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, which oversees the Burbank Airport, is sponsoring an ongoing ‘Task Force’ of elected officials to hear out the cohort of grassroots groups and recommend a solution to the FAA.
Resident activists aren’t holding their breath, but they did celebrate on Friday when L.A. City Attorney Mike Feuer penned a letter to the FAA demanding a directive on air traffic controllers to cease flying south of the 101 freeway.
Patrick Lammerding, deputy executive director of planning and development for Hollywood Burbank Airport, said that it’s impossible to discern whether the spike in complaints are simply due to availability of a new technology or an actual change on the ground (in the sky, rather).
“This thing has kind of thrown all the airports in the country for a loop, where people are going to push that darn thing all day and make 10,000 complaints from one person,” he said. “It shifts the data around to a point where I can’t compare it to pre-button.”
Lisa Carloss of UpRoar L.A., one of the community groups formed to fight Metroplex measures and disperse the flight departure over a wider swath of the Valley, called that “twisted logic.” She said Airnoise.io complaints annoy the agencies “because it makes it impossible for them to ignore the devastation they are wreaking on our communities.”
Los Angeles World Airports, which oversees Van Nuys Airport, said it too has had to recalibrate for the increase in complaints.
The complaints are “just another way for the community to communicate that this is a major issue,” said LAWA manager Kathryn Pantoja. “But I don’t think they’re providing anything in their noise complaints that’s directing how we move forward with the FAA.”
Yet up even higher in the Studio City Hills, and directly under what residents say is the usual path for passenger jets, homeowner Jim McClure is of a more tranquil mind.
“I hear them literally at 5:30 in the morning and it’s every five minutes,” he said. “It’s the FAA, what can we do about it? Part of me says they’re just going to go over someone else’s house. So you get used to it, to tell you the truth.”