Opinion

Hell-icopters

The administration has shifted traffic downtown, much to residents’ annoyance.

The administration has shifted traffic downtown, much to residents’ annoyance. (AP)

Whichever side you take in New York City’s long-standing helicopter wars, one thing is true: The views from one flying over the city, in all its five-borough glory, are magnificent. Rising from the Downtown Heliport, banking in a long slow turn towards the Statue of Liberty, circling the Lady at a respectful 1,500 feet, the helicopter I took then skirted the Financial District before heading up what our pilot kept calling the muddy Hudson, angling away from the George Washington Bridge (whose stanchions are a huge, hittable 650 feet) and eventually crossing the Upper West Side diagonally to reach The Bronx and Yankee Stadium.

We were flying the legal route — over water — rather than up West End Avenue, and staying high, at 2,000 feet, said our pilot.

In many ways this is a vast improvement — from a New Yorker’s point of view — over the old, pre-2010 days of completely unregulated small-plane and helo flights that flew pretty much at will.

Until recently, the universe of helicopters and small planes went basically unregulated under the Federal Aviation Administration’s “freedom to fly” principle that treated the skies of America — including skies over densely populated cities — as highways. Standard procedure was for small aircraft to fly under visual flight rules (VFR), using “see and avoid,” and keeping below 1,500 feet to stay clear of big planes.

“The sky is open hunting. Their freedom to fly is our freedom to suffer,” says East Sider Joy Held, founder of the Helicopter Noise Coalition, which, along with other activists, has successfully pushed very hard for route changes and restrictions over the years.

At their core, the helicopter wars are pretty simple — pitting the economic interests of the tourism industry (a record 50.5 million visitors spent some $32 billion in New York last year) against the neighborhoods in the flight paths.

In some ways, the neighborhoods are winning, having secured substantial concessions over the last few years. Because of a complex set of reasons, however, they often don’t feel like victors.

For one thing, the sheer volume remains daunting. In 2010 (the latest year for which data are available), well over 200,000 passengers took some 62,000 helicopter flights (down from a peak of 70,000) departing and landing at the city’s three heliports. Another large — but uncounted and unregulated — number of flights enter New York air space from New Jersey, Westchester and Long Island. And some 20,000 flights — also uncounted and unregulated — are made by emergency services, the Police Department, film and media crews and the military.

Standing on a rooftop garden on Riverside Drive in the 80s on a Saturday morning in April, I timed helicopters coming from multiple directions every three minutes — the skies were never quiet.

Imagine how it was before the collision of a small plane and a tourist helicopter in August 2009 that left nine dead, after which tougher regulations were drawn up by the city’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the Eastern Region Helicopter Council (ERHC) and five helicopter tour operators.

The plan eliminated tours over both Central Park and the Empire State Building, banned all sightseeing flights over Brooklyn, abolished all short tours of four to eight minutes, and curtailed the tour routes.

NYCEDC also redirected all tours to the city-owned Downtown Heliport, banning them at the West Side’s 30th Street Heliport (which is to be closed by Dec. 31 of this year — though its operators may reopen elsewhere) and the East Side’s 34th Street Heliport.

All sightseeing helicopters now approach and depart the Downtown Heliport from the south, maximizing their distance from Brooklyn Bridge Park. All tours are supposed to avoid flying over land by following the center of the Hudson River north to either 79th Street or Yankee Stadium, before returning south by flying down the west side of the Hudson. All flights are to be at 1,500 feet or above.

These are impressive reforms. The lucrative short hops (for $130 per person!) to the middle of Central Park — then hovering over Sheep Meadow — have been halted. There’s no more buzzing of the Empire State Building. The EDC’s recommended altitude of 1,500 feet is about three times as high as helos were routinely flying in the old days. Former pilot Robert Grotell, special advisor to ERHC, is surely correct when he says, “There’s no better noise mitigation than altitude. The higher the better.”

Why then does Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the West Side, continue to get angry complaints about helicopters? “My biggest constituent issue on nice days,” she says.

One reason is that the many helicopter pilots are apparently not complying. On Easter weekend, dozens of flights were made up and down West End Avenue, for example. Even when no helicopter was in sight, the air filled with a low, constant rumble. Says Grotter, “A helicopter can be over the water where it belongs, but its noise footprint will extend inland beyond the river.”

And it remains dangerous. Former Marine Corps helicopter pilot Justin Green, now a lawyer who has represented helicopter pilots, says of the Hudson River corridor, “That’s a really narrow slice of air space below 1,100. If I’m smart, I have my map out, I’ve turned my radio to the right frequency, I start self-announcing and I keep my head on a swivel. There will be fixed-wing coming in from Teterboro. You may have a wandering blimp. There’ll be helos taking off from different parts of the city — including 30th Street — and climbing up into the air space.

“That’s a lot of noise and a lot of activity,” he says. “If you blow it, it’s really important that your mistakes are made over the river, and you don’t end up with carnage in the streets.”

A second reason for uptown unhappiness is the unregulated crosstown air traffic, which is largely corporate and government, using what the FAA rather tactlessly calls the “Central Park route.” Helicopters can fly the breadth of Manhattan, from 59th to 110th streets, legally. These are not sightseeing tours, but corporate, private, government and airport transit planes. The helos are often huge Sikorskys, flying very low diagonal routes as they thunder past overhead.

Green argues that the corporate problem should be easy to fix because they get no special benefit from flying low and should be willing to move high with FAA and City of New York encouragement under a noise-abatement plan — if they were pushed. Yet the Central Park route has been left out of the negotiations so far because corporate helos operate under freedom-to-fly.

Still, Central Park advocates should probably count themselves lucky, since their old nemesis — the sightseeing tours — have been moved entirely downtown.

And there lies the rub for New York state Sen. Daniel Squadron, who represents parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. “With all the sightseeing helicopters taking off from just the one heliport, you now have way too many flights in way too small an area. The problem has just been shifted downtown, into the harbor. This situation is not tenable.”

And, indeed, lower Manhattan’s gauntlet has been thrown down. Community Board 1’s district manager, Noah Pfefferblit, says, “We oppose all tours downtown. EDC has pretty much done what they could — it’s not that they’re not trying — but this isn’t working.”

How serious is lower Manhattan’s density of flights? Stefan Friedman, a spokesman for ERHC, dividing up the 62,000 annual flights, e-mailed, “That’s 57 flight per day for each of the three heliports. Assuming all three heliports are open 12 hours a day (West 30th Street is 24/7, but the number of flights coming in and out during the overnight hours are negligible), that breaks down to between four and five ‘ops’ (takeoffs or landings) per hour at each of the heliports.”

He argues: Not exactly the “flight of the valkyries” described by opponents.

But as I stood facing south on the East River’s Pier 6 on a cloudless morning, it was precisely that image that came involuntarily to mind — 12 helicopters landed in about 30 minutes. I asked an employee if that was a lot. “Not for a nice spring day,” he said. “Yesterday we were landing 50 an hour.”

Scenes like this have critics wondering if the rules are being followed, and if their concerns are being heard. Will it take another tragedy for regulators to take on the swarm?

Pilot Justin Green recalls that when he was undergoing his initial training as an aviation safety officer, his Marine commander said, “All safety regulations are written in blood. Because it takes someone dying to get a change made.”

Until then, one thing’s clear: The helicopters are not going anywhere — for both economic and political reasons.

New York has three heliports and a thriving helo sightseeing industry generating $50 million annually and employing over 300 people. City Hall is determined to keep helicopters in New York, arguing that city-owned heliports are the only way to control behavior.

NYCEDC president Seth Pinsky warns that if the tour operators are pushed out of New York and start flying from New Jersey, “That’s the last time they’ll take our phone call.”

Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.