Stan White, 74, his wife, and several of their neighbors are at a breaking point with low-flying, small noisy lesson planes, going back and forth over their homes, from as early as 6 A.M. to as late as 11 P.M., above their southeast Donner Springs neighborhood, near the Reno-Tahoe International Airport.
They document flight patterns, take videos and identifying photos with tail numbers visible. They meet every Saturday morning to plot a new strategy, commiserate and compare notes.
White says he’s attended several Airport Sustainability Advisory Committee meetings and submitted public comments regarding noise and low flight issues, contacted the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority requesting that something be done to alleviate the problem, contacted the FAA regarding noise and flying practices over his house, contacted the City of Reno code enforcement regarding excessive noise, contacted his Ward 3 city council person and Congressional representatives, presented at a Reno City Council meeting and contacted the owner of Great Basin Aviation, the flight school he blames for creating the noise and low overflights situation, all to no avail to resolve the situation.
“We’re just being ignored,” he told Our Town Reno during a recent phone conversation. The worst part of the year is summer and fall when the weather is nice. “If the weather's bad, they usually don't fly,” White said, “So I find myself hoping for bad weather.”
Our Town Reno sent messages to the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority and Great Basin Aviation and quickly received this message from Stacey Sunday, the airport’s Director of Corporate Communications.
“I’ve passed your inquiry to Great Basin (though I know you have also reached out to them) and to the airport’s Noise Analyst. Here is some information we can provide, but I did recommend that Great Basin responds to your inquiry as they feel is appropriate:
The Reno Tahoe Airport Authority (RTAA) is here to listen to and support aviation and the community at large and recognizes that noise is an inherent part of this industry. We also recognize that noise from aircraft can seem more prevalent in the warmer months when people spend more time outdoors and often leave their windows open. There are online tools for people to look up information about aircraft - such as proximity to an address and projected decibel levels. We also have methods for people to report noise issues to us directly including our Hotline (775) 328-6468 or our Contact Form available at www.renoairport.com.”
The message added that “all recorded noise complaints are stored in a database and are reported to the Airport Noise Advisory Panel [previously ANAP] on a quarterly basis” and also included FAA links and phone numbers for noise concerns.
The types of planes which are annoying White and neighbors.
White, who previously lived in Folsom working for Intel, has been living in Donner Springs for 20 years, but believes the school flights are now negatively affecting his property’s value.
“I knew the airport was there,” he said. “But until three years ago, the traffic did not fly over my house. I mean, occasionally a helicopter would go over, but only occasionally.”
Now he’s most annoyed by “touch and go” patterns.
“The plane will take off, it will circle around, go to the other end of the runway and come down like it was going to land, and maybe touch the wheels on the runway, but not stop and then take off again. That's called a touch and go,” White explained in painful detail. “They’ll circle around and do the same thing again, sometimes a dozen times or more in a row. So they come over to the house here in the neighborhood about every five minutes. ”
A comment submitted by White to a Ward 3 NAB meeting.
Donner Springs is a residential area with big trees, a few elementary schools and convenient access to other parts of town. The Reno-Sparks Neighborhoods website describes it as being “in the shadow of Rattlesnake Mountain” and “one of the flattest and most bikeable in the region.” But now White says it’s been ruined by these lesson flights.
White says his goal is not to get Great Basin Aviation out of business but rather “to have them act in a responsible manner and be good neighbors. One solution that I would probably accept would be for them simply to stop flying over this neighborhood. They can fly somewhere else. They can do what everybody else at the airport does. They can go fly north and they can fly south. They don't have to take off and immediately turn and come over a few hundred feet over our neighborhood.”
One of his neighbors, John Iaconianni, 66, believes they should move their flying classes to the Stead airport.
“The airport has gotten so busy now, you know with flights, so just move them to Stead. In [Las Vegas], they moved the flight schools to North Las Vegas and to Henderson away from commercial traffic. This is an accident waiting to happen over here,” he warned.
Training flights tracked on the evening of Oct. 6.
Iaconianni has been a homeowner in the neighborhood since 2016, which he was happy with until three years ago, when the flight classes started just above residential properties. Now he goes out into his backyard to take decibel readings of how loud the planes are.
“It’s nerve wracking,” he said. “It’s disruptive to our way of living, our privacy, our everyday way of life. My wife works from home [as a graphic designer] up here on the second floor, and, they get so low and so loud that she can't even keep the bedroom window open.”
“Trying to enjoy our own backyards this weekend nearly impossible with this disrespectful behavior from the airport and flight schools,” Iaconianni wrote this past weekend.
Iaconianni is also frustrated with the lack of responses. “It makes you feel like you just don't matter,” he said. “They're all pilots,” he said of most of the people they’ve been trying to reason with. “So they have their own world and stick up for each other. But we’re concerned about our home values. I can't even hold a conversation on the weekends sometimes with my grandkids in the backyard and try to teach them how to play catch because it's so loud.”
Both believe the flight school is trying to save money by taking the neighborhood route. “The shorter they can get back and forth to the runway to do their touch and goes they save fuel, and especially with the price of fuel going up, you know,” Iaconianni said.
“This stuff's very expensive these days,” White said. “They can get whatever they need to do with their students done by flying over this neighborhood rather than going out further and burning up more fuel. But I think what they should do, like everybody else in business does, if your expenses go up, you charge the customers more. It's pretty simple.”
One of their neighbors, dealing with PTSD and other health issues, decided to move to Spanish Springs, and White is pondering a relocation within Reno as well.
Iaconianni, who still works part-time for UPS after a long career, says he’ll keep fighting to stay and correct the situation, however more phone calls, flight tracking, presentations and pleas it takes.