Communities Enduring Loud Flight Paths Into SFO Fight For Quiet Skies

SANTA CRUZ (KPIX 5) -- The roar from airplanes headed to San Francisco International Airport is disturbing communities on the ground.

The Federal Aviation Administration is working to solve the problem, but the plans are pitting communities against each other.

Sky Posse spokesperson Mary-Jo Fremont said, "It's like slow torture."

A report was supposed to cut through the noise, through the complaints and through competing agendas in order to cut down on the non-stop noise from airplanes affecting communities from Santa Cruz to San Mateo.

Don Lane, a Santa Cruz City Councilman, was a Select Committee Member that drafted the report for the FAA, but he says the process got hijacked by people willing to solve their community's noise problem by simply shifting the planes somewhere else.

Lane said, "The people under the current path who are suffering the most were just so insistent in getting complete relief."

The committee recommended shifting the controversial flight path into SFO from its current track -- which takes planes over the city of Capitola -- to the west and directly over Santa Cruz.

Lane has written a scathing letter to his own committee expressing his "profound disappointment" and "bitterness" over the decision.

A bitterness felt by many living on the Peninsula where three separate flight paths converge over Menlo Park as planes prepare to land at SFO.

For them, the report offers little relief, little to quiet their concerns about noise.

Fremont said, "You hear the plane coming. And then you get the pain. And then it dissipates...And then, Boom! There's another plane."

The report has now been submitted to representatives Anna Eshoo, Sam Farr and Jackie Speier.

It's up to them to decide it they'll support or reject the proposed changes. People who aren't happy with the report have vowed to keep fighting.