The Age of Noise

The Air Force calls it "The Sound of Freedom." The airline industry calls it the price of progress. The people who live near the major military airbases and commercial airports around the U.S. call it sheer hell.

It is all three. It is the thunderclap of a sonic boom produced by a supersonic aircraft, and the nerve-ragging whine and roar of jetliners as they take off and land. Together they add up to a sore domestic problem that will increase in quantum jumps in the years ahead.

Sonics and Suits. This possibility had not occurred to the majority of groundlings in the U.S. until last week, when a Supreme Court decision lowered a sonic boom of its own. Ruled the court in a 7-2 decision: local airport authorities are liable for damages if aircraft noise and vibration make life miserable for homeowners who live near an airport.

As soon as the decision hit the wires, the sound wave that reverberated most across the U.S. was the tinkling of telephones as householders called their lawyers and ordered them to start suing. In most major cities, suits were already pending. In New York alone, 809 Long Island property owners are waiting to go to court against 40 airlines and the Port of New York Authority, which runs the three major metropolitan airports. In Seattle, 250 homeowners are suing the Port of Seattle for millions. Los Angeles International Airport will soon be slapped with claims from 3,000 residents. In Chicago, where the complaints from residents living near O'Hare Field run to more than 30 a month, attorneys are hurriedly putting their briefs together. In Dallas, 35 citizens are pressing suits for $10,000 to $12,000 apiece. In nearly every case, the homeowners' claims are the same: the roaring nuisance of the planes has reduced property values, shattered nerves, damaged property.

Through the Window. The case upon which the court made its ruling was brought by a Pittsburgh attorney, Thomas N. Griggs, 57. When he bought a 19-acre estate outside town in 1945, it was surrounded by pleasantly rolling open country. Then in 1952, the county built the Greater Pittsburgh Airport. From his bed at night, Griggs could see the planes take off from the end of the airport runway about 3,000 ft. from his house and head straight toward his window, and then rise in a scary whoosh about 150 ft. above his chimney. "I would be wakened and couldn't go back to sleep until the planes had stopped," he said. "When the windows were open in the summer, the planes would stop conversation inside the house itself. I have had people seated at my dinner table, and they'd look out the dining-room window and see the planes coming over the trees headed toward the house. That sort of thing you get sensitive about." Even Griggs's wife, who is so hard of hearing that "you had to virtually shout in her ear," was awakened by the planes' vibrations. Windows rattled; plaster fell in the living and dining rooms. Running from one side of the house to another, Lawyer Griggs chased after the planes to note their markings so that he could substantiate his complaints with the airlines.

At length, Griggs stuffed himself with sleeping pills and his ears with plugs, but it was no use. He finally leased a small cottage to which he and his wife retreated when they anticipated a busy night on the runway. A representative of the Airline Pilots Association further aggravated his fears with the admission that "in event of motor failure on takeoff, pilots would have no recourse but to plow into my house." In 1953 Griggs filed suit against the airport. In 1956 he sold his house and five acres to the St. Philip's Episcopal Church (whose congregation has since been bothered only a few times on Sunday mornings; when that happens, says Pastor Donald Clawson, "we simply stop and say a little silent prayer for the pilot"). Griggs won his case, was awarded $12,690 in damages, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Allegheny County was not liable. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision reversed the Pennsylvania Court. Now Griggs will be entitled to seek higher damages against the county before a jury.

Bulls & Chickens. In this case, as in thousands of others, the courts will decide on the merits of claims and on dollar amounts. But beyond the courtroom looms the bigger question of how the U.S. proposes to accommodate itself to an ever noisier jet age. The first railroad trains scared the living daylights out of people; in the early 1800s, anti-railroad interests spread dark warnings among farmers that the trains made bulls impotent and dried up cows' udders. For the air age, the classic case was U.S. v. Causby (1946), in which the Supreme Court held that low-flying military aircraft had so badly disturbed barnyard life on a North Carolina chicken farm as to make the chicken business there impossible.

To keep chickens and the human populace at peace, the Federal Government and the airlines have spent millions of dollars. Noise-suppressors have been installed on commercial jet engines. But they weigh 400 lbs. apiece, thus not only reducing the payload but also cutting the engine's power. Most airports now have specific regulations for direction, lift-off and landing, all aimed at keeping noise and annoyance to a minimum. Glide paths are established that require planes to make their ascents and descents sharply.

Many airports specify the use of runways that take ear-blasting traffic away from residential areas.

Plane Fear. Some airports have gone so far as to suspend jet traffic completely during certain hours; in Montreal and London, no jet flights move between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. But appeasing the neighborhood complainers can add to the pilot's problems. At Idlewild, for example, planes using Runway 31-Left are ordered to climb sharply and turn sharp left seconds after take-off to avoid passing over populous Jamaica--which is exactly the procedure followed by the American Airlines jet that crashed into Jamaica Bay (see SCIENCE).

Some experts claim that it is not the noise that bothers people so much as the fear of falling aircraft that it engenders. Says Jack F. Ramsberger, executive director of the National Air Transport Coordinating Committee: "People still don't know much about planes. Only about 15% of the population uses airplanes. When most people hear a plane go over the house again and again, they get the feeling they might find it in the living room some day." Most complaints come during the warm months, adds Ramsberger. "Every year summer comes, the windows open, people are re-exposed, and we get a rash of complaints. The people believe something new is happening. The only thing that happened is that they opened their windows." Even with the windows closed the year-round, the noise and nerve-numbing will continue--and get worse with the advent of supersonic commercial traffic. Nothing can be done to stop a sonic boom,* though the sound can be attenuated somewhat by flying at altitudes higher than 30,000 ft.

The only way to avoid bothering the neighbors with other jet noises is to make sure that an airport authority buys enough land for a buffer zone around its property.

Washington's new Dulles International Airport, for instance, will have special 1,000-ft.-wide belts of closely planted trees at the ends of each of the two-mile-long runways. This foliage will help cut down the noise. But for many metropolitan airports that are already tightly ringed by communities, it is too late to do anything more than pay the claims made by surrounding residents and hope that they move away soon.

* The biggest boom yet of the supersonic age hit only last week, when a four-jet B58 Hustler streaked nonstop from Los Angeles to New York and back in a record-smashing 4 hr. 42 min., at an overall average of 1,044.3 m.p.h.

Also smashed: countless windows and bric-a-brac, shattered by the continuous sonic boom that the plane created. One Air Force officer had predicted before the flight: "This ought to be good for an air speed of 1,300 m.p.h. and a ground speed of 13,000 broken windows."

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