so i think the first order of business will be to to do some introductions and really the objective for tonight is to give you an update on the efforts that have gone on over the last year since this situation with runway thirty three al has impacted not only be on water down but also cambridge and arlington and so what i'll do is just recognize the folks who are who are here to my left is dennis duff who is the watertown representative to the logan cac harvey steiner who is also a representative from watertown the alternate  here from congresswoman clark's office to my right is john hacked who is the state representative for watertown and i believe parts of cambridge as well we also have nancy gains in the audience who is representing representative decker from cambridge and tony palumbo also who is the town counselor from watertown and frank c on o is in the audience who is the logan cac rep for arlington so they get everybody so all right great so again what we're going to do tonight is follow the agenda which is for those of you who were here a year ago which was i think almost exactly a year ago when we had a meeting the last informational meeting this might be a review for some of you but for those of you who are coming here for the first time i think it's useful to sub some context so i'm going to do is run through a number of slides that will give you a little bit of background on kind of how we got here and got an update on all of the activities that have gone on over the past year talk a little bit about what some of the some of the options are and then we'll have time to hear from the  representatives who have been working very hard in conjunction with us on this particular issue then questions from residents and then kind of an open discussion about what some of the next steps are so that further ado basically the the f a a is charged with running an efficient and safe air air traffic system and logan airport is unique because it it is probably one of the closer airports into an urban area and has a number of different runways and a number of different configurations that are used at different times based on weather and again this is not an arbitrary decision as to which runway is used at what at what point in time it's really based on the direction of the wind airplanes like to take off into the wind so the runways that have impacted belmont and watertown in the last couple years or  was specifically or runway thirty three left which is used when there is a predominant northwest wind the other runway that's utilized in that configuration is runway twenty seven and you can see in the google next gen for the i think you'll see that this has been an ongoing process to modernize the air traffic control system which includes the point software point and new types of technolog that said i don't know if this is going to be good for us but the reality of it is that the way the f d a downgrades whether something is going to be a significant impact and we'll talk about is a little bit later for evaluating and back and so the chances of them finding that these changes were going to have anything other than no significant impact will probably be very low as long as the kind i've benefited from this is that if you can narrow the forecasts on departures it leaves more airspace open for arrivals and so if you fly on a recently the frequency of you going sometimes from people saying well i don't hear any or point noise in that because actually for certain people even in our own communities they've gotten less airplane over flights than they did previously so the tower and really try to understand one of the buy things what can we introduce very boldly into this process how hard would it be and so from my theoretical one of the outcomes of phase three of this noise study is something that the trial started out the fifteenth of november and then to run for the next three months and basically the way logan operates is that  on flights for three days in a row and so what this runway use procedures going and trying to do is when possible they're going to try to avoid and if it's something that can be administered by air traffic control reasonably then you could become a permanent permanent procedure mcandrews been working with us for the better part of last year as well as quite a few people in her staff both in washington and here and you know one of the things that we came back with down to fifty five which would actually cost billions of dollars and i think that it's a an interesting discussion but in order to know that you don't have to hear it if you look at the map of how many communities limitations that's another avenue for us to continue to pursue i flew recently down to own land and flew on one of those are now pass and the planes are on autopilot  then it and thirty francs for your service on the cac as i think we've all learned gratis process that it's probably a community that opportunity for having their voices heard at this point  of history that we've also been volatile in the past year so i'm not in a rehash that i do want to talk about some of the more recent actions on the federal side that i can hopefully out a little more to  kirk expressing very disappointing and i'm actually going to quote from that and response just and i have copies to identifying a lack of progress on the part of the f a a and both the negative effects noise pollution has on the health letter back from the f a a administrator on that first letter which details i've given copies to every year and a couple extra people are interested which details their response cars i'm going to send a letter back to the f a a response to that as well and i'm headed emphasize that she would like them to consider not only looking at communities that are affected that specific orders with in works it's very interesting you know it's an average it is big it's a decimal measure right and if they call the reason they call it day night as it is they add ten they add ten decimals between the hours of ten eight p seven am otherwise it's basically just an average of the sound energy a sound energy is you know decibels it does of us as the log of sound energy so you know the difference between thirty and and eighty decibels is a factor of one hundred thousand in terms of sound energy so the average is to determined primarily by the few loud events so it doesn't looted that much by the quiet seconds it's those while you had you know a level that was one hundred thousand times greater for a certain period of time that's the way the math tends to work so actually if you we the the numbers that we got from we get the  monitoring over and adriana's that we got the data back exactly know the second by second numbers from that noise meter and if the average even if you take the loudest the loudest single hour and you  compute the average for that loud a single hour it was about fifty five at that site you know you have a few you know during a few moments you have flights that maybe in a very few flights that are you know above the sixty five level individually but the average for the loudest single hour is fifty five and most of the hours are well well well below that so we're not close to that threshold so so on the average even when you when you back out the sort of averaging big so that was the first that was the first layer of thing that you know we sort of asking when we came to this is the fact that it's an average sort of not reflecting where we are and the answer is not doesn't help i mean if it were just a lock with that that threshold is just a really high threshold sixty five d n a is it's you know as you say it's like the having this one hundred times the current level of traffic that would be that's what it would take to get from where we are in belmont in watertown to get to sixty five the n l or we'd have to be a lot closer to the airport like ten times close to the airport in other words we would have to be a nice boston or winthrop to get the d n a off to sixty five the other thing to recognize is that whenever you change a metric you might expand the scope of who's affected but you're probably not going to change the rank ordering of who's affected most in other words no matter when what no matter how we change the metric cambridge is going to be noisier than belmont medford is going to be noisier than cambridge and for ever it's go noisier than medford and east boston is going to be a lot noisier than any of those things so that you know before we're way back in line in terms of getting any perspire to killer noise really so i'm not particularly you know how i don't have high expectations for the idea that the metric change is going to get us someplace the the second point that that i you know the second thing is you tend to ask as well couldn't we basically go back to the old system you know and sort of spread the flights around so we don't have a as concentrated and from the from a broader public policy standpoint first of all it's a completely nonstarter to go back to where we were because the new system is so much better in terms of the ability of the f a a is to tower guys to manage the flights without so much intervention as well as feel an efficiency and so forth so there's no way they're going to go back and get rid of the system that they spent billions of billions of dollars and you know years and years of the vellum to the chief but then you say what could you so that just like paying them back and forth a little bit you know give us a little bit of relief and it meaning you know after mile this way half a mile that way you know so so so the interesting thing about that and this is on my website if you look at that data i mean that we have the data from the they provided you know the minute by minute noise levels and they correlated that with their radar so you can see where the planes are when they're reaching their peak noise levels over over houses and the it clearly is a clear concentration of the planes at certain distances you know one from around his house like two or three hundred meters horizontally you know is the belmont highest frequency and maybe a thousand meters twelve hundred meters in the other direction is watertown interesting thing is there isn't that much difference in the noise levels between a plane you know that's three hundred miles three hundred meters over and a mile up and a plane it's one thousand meters over and a mile long so  it's my personal opinion i could make you know my personal conviction that sort of moving things a half a mile either way won't make a noise level difference that we would notice and and given the kind of rock solid that i hear from the f a a toward so sort of trying to turn the back clock back and increase the variability of over what they've achieved in terms of stability of flight paths i don't i don't particularly think that's a good you think hope for that's my personal opinion  what i do think is interesting i think is the work that you know the work that the cacs been doing on the changing the runway configuration from day to day i mean that's not a simple thing really because if you think about it you get all these planes flying into the airport you sort of got to say ok when are you going to come in a different way so you've got to get to do that with a certain medicare when you change you know on a on it on an hour to hour basis but they do do it so they know how to do it they do it all the time to respond to weather  think they can do that so they can reduce the you know the the experience of just having a go on day in and day out if there's no need to do that i think for say you know they think they don't like to change if they don't have to so they might keep it on three days in a row  it's there's no real weather imperative to keep in the same way so i think they can start varying that and i think i'll be a step forward i'm i'm hopeful that that will give us a sense of relief we won't have but that won't mean that that will give relief to other people to their you know that's going to move around so the total experience of noise isn't going to change much force and it will just be a little bit more broken up we would have these long runs so that that's a hopeful thing in the longer run i think the things that i am most hopeful for  the continuing improvement of the fleet out there the airlines have come a long way in terms of the noise levels the overall noise levels in in the skies in our communities are much less than they used to be and that's a result of just airplanes that are vastly quieter than you used to be and even though we are carrying more passengers today if you as you've noticed if you fly the flights are booked there's no room on those flights so they've gotten much more efficient in terms of the loading their flights or the number of flights out of logan has actually gone down over the last ten to fifteen years you're shaking your head no there are the routing flights for sure there are any flights but if you compare where we are to where we were ten or fifteen years ago and those those numbers of believe are on my website or those that they're very available the sort of total annual flights number of flights taking off of the airport have gone down i'm not saying it's not noisy believe i'm not trying to tell you that i'm just trying to say that i think the best hope for the for the future is continuing improvement in the quality of of of the planes flying over us though they're going to get quieter so i think i'm the state rep for most of watertown and also parts of cambridge west cambridge and north cambridge where i have increasingly been hearing from people about the same problem i want to likewise thank myron dennis and harvey for their incredible work i mean you look at the amount of information that they have digested and the amount of knowledge that they've gained over the course of the last year or so on what's a very very complicated subject and don't forget they're doing this all in their spare time so it's really remarkable what they've been doing and it's really the basis for much of our understanding of the issues here and therefore our understanding of what mean we might be able to do about it i also want to recognize all my legislative colleagues for what they've been doing on this well and dave and i have been working on  this collaboratively for better than a year and now since congresswoman clarke has come into office she has been a great partner and we're also very happy to have senator warren's help senator markey organized a meeting that we had with the f a a over the summer so they're increasingly engaged as well and and each of these people who represent you really are i think exemplars of of good responsive government i mean what will has done in terms of his analysis of the data and then his posting out on his site and all the information he provides that's that's what government ought to be like and i say this not just because i want to give these guys you know  extraordinarily recalcitrant and extraordinarily difficult they have brought us out to the field to look at their work they have they participated in a meeting we had in center office but really their attitude has been one of we've done what we have to do we don't really like dealing with the public and we're not going to move and just as someone who works in government i find that a very difficult attitude to accept and unfortunately the result of that has been it's been very difficult to engage them on the host of both sort of big issues and small issues that are involved here  about how the they are now have is is a is a game changer it really is i mean we we're all experiencing it our lives have changed and despite that fact the f a a has been very resistant to the idea of revisiting the way in which that game change in their technology and the game change that has occurred in our lives should be evaluated they want to use their old  metrics you know we all know because we're all experiencing it and that's why we're here in this room tonight the qualitative difference from the constant repetitive overflights and you know i i hear what will saying about the data half a mile here after mile there doesn't matter if you look at the noise levels i personally just from my own day to day experience i think that half a mile is a big difference and i think some of it has to do just with again it's that constant repetitive whine at sort of the same pitch the same level over and over and over again now you know maybe maybe i'm wrong i mean that's impression clearly we want this driven by good science and good data but there too i mean it's been very difficult to get the f a a to accept the possibility that that slight variation in the flight paths might allow them to achieve most of what they want to achieve with our now while giving us some relief in terms of the noise this  is again the for the lack of responsiveness on the part of the f a a is meant that it feels like they want a hundred percent of what they want and they want to give us a zero percent of what we want where what we really want is some sort of balance we recognize that this next gen technology has advantages we we fly we are concerned about the environment we're concerned safety nobody's saying it's an unmitigated disaster but is there some middle ground that we can reach or some sort of you know seventy five percent for them and twenty five percent for us i'm not sure but again until you can have that conversation with them it's very difficult to know and this is what's been very frustrating about working on the issue you know it feels like we're kind of in a position and i give myron all the credit in the world i mean he's he's racking his brain every day for the sort of silver bullet that we can go back to the f a a and say look here's the answer but i kind of feel like that's putting the burden on the wrong side i feel like more of the burden should be on the f a a to demonstrate to us they have all the resources all the expertise that it isn't possible again to achieve most of what they need without it if it isn't possible i'm going to get all my negatives mixed up here you know what i'm saying we would like to see them demonstrate to us that this is the only possible way that it can be my sense is that there is probably some middle ground here that allows them to achieve most of what they want but gives us some relief but we need to engage with them in order to try to find out what that middle ground is to make a difference here that's where the handles are that's where the money comes from for the f a a this reauthorization process i think is a particularly potent handle and i think we should be thinking about how we can be supporting congresswoman clark and the senators to press art case in the course of this reauthorization process but i guess i also feel that and i think we have to sort of think of this as a you know like of like a movement we need a movement and all of the aspects of a movement in order to bring all the available you know pressure that we can to all of the levels that we're operating at you what you're doing in terms of logging your complaints stream lee important we've begun conversations with some of the other communities in this area about possibly doing some sort of a a common resolution from all of the local governments you know a single resolution that could be adopted by the town council in watertown the board selectmen in arlington the city council in cambridge the board of selectmen in belmont as many communities as we can possibly engage basically saying we've got a problem here and the people in our communities care about this and it's affecting quality of life in a broad area and we know we can't control the airplanes so we need our governor we need our attorney general we need our congress people we need our senators to help us figure this out i mean that's one element again of what i think of as has to be a multifaceted movement it's going to take a lot of perseverance i think we all have to be ready to stay at this for the long haul but i also think you know you never know when things are going a break and someone's going to hopefully in the f a a say you know let's try to solve this problem i think a little bit i don't know if there are any people in the room here from cambridge but we spent a lot of time a couple of years ago dealing with an issue of ethanol shipments through cambridge and that was a that was in him admittedly an even more immediate threat in terms of public safety this is important but it didn't an involved ethanol trains blowing up in your backyard but what we were told with regard to that issue was similarly you local people you state people you're forgetting you're not going to get anything done this is a federal matter the federal r administration sets all the rules are our congresspeople were very pessimistic about what could be done but everybody just kind of kept banging away at it at whatever level they were working out at the local level the state level we did engage our federal delegation and lo and behold the people who wanted to ship that ethanol across the railroad tracks through cambridge also it was going to come through belmont by the way they backed off now i'm not saying this is an exact analogy but i think of this is it in a similar way in terms of just how we just have to keep at it we have to keep at it because this is really making a difference in a lot of people's lives and we're going to keep at it and i think ultimately we will get we will get somewhere i don't know exactly what we'll get and i don't know when but we're going to keep at it and i think we will get there and you're saying work of myron and the others on the cac and center brownsburg and hacked in our federal delegation to u s senators and congresswoman clarke you know i guess one thing i'd say at the outset is you know when you're a state representative or you you're not very far from the people you represent i mean these things go right over my house i mean so you know the other day i was just in a quiet moment i had my cup of coffee i was going to relax and read the papers just to a nice moment in my life i thought and just boom boom boom one after another so i also would tell you i know it's weird that some people are really bothered by it and  their neighbors aren't i just talked to a woman on my way here from who lives in belmont and i six plane i was coming to this meeting and she said i know there's more airplane noise over belmont and i  lot i agree with representative hack that a lot of times with community activism you you can't give up if you keep banging away at all the various levels you know but i guess a blessing and a curse is that i'm a lawyer you know i i always do go back to the law and you know as the doctor is probably some lawyers and here it is the doctrine of preemption federal law and certain cases pre amps state law imagine if all fifty states had their own rules on on on air traffic you know he would work in and federal law really applies in this situation more than you know as a state representative what's so is there a budget item i can sponsor in the house is there a piece of legislation i can sponsor in the statehouse not really and i got curious enough to pull the briefs from the mill litigation i have the maybe we'll find a way to get them scanned and online for those i  read the petitioner's brief the people from milton and hyde park their pro se meaning they're representing themselves and you know i would say for pro se litigants they've they've did a pretty good job although when you read the f a a reply brief it's unbelievable they have floors from four different parts of the federal government the f a a lawyers the justice department lawyers i mean and  you know it's so what happened is there was a decision of no significant impact a record of decision that's a law that's a rule making that's a law that's federal law now so that the have appealed it to federal court the u s court of appeals that has jurisdiction over it and they have made a number of arguments they've challenge the the i am the which is the basically the integrated noise model the justice argument that there's an executive order that they have to when you do rule making said you have to assess the impact on minority communities low income communities part of hyde park milne i guess has fact they made a clean air argument that the national ambient air quality standards on the clean air act have been violated by the way in a concentrated path the amount of emissions so so you know they've made a series of arguments i mean the challenge is because i wondered if communities could band together and we would institute litigation the challenges under under administrative law the standard for review is arbitrary and  is you'd have to almost show the f a a had no rational basis upon which it it made its decision there it's hard to overturn these rule made under the law and  o as as myron said when he made his presentation i'm not remarkably hopeful that the litigants will prevail but it is one more thing as to john talk about banging away and one more way that people are kind of fighting back  you know i plan to stay engaged i'm sure i hope all you will stay engaged i mean that there is some good news i mean they explained to us we went to the airport they took us up in the tower they took us down on the runways i mean you know that months and many of our windows will be closed in obviously so i think in the short term in the next months you're going to have some relief to the extent this is bothering you want to day to day basis there are is a movement to have airplanes with that or more quiet and the the director of aviation at that at boston logan airport said that he thinks within a few years will notice a difference just because the next generation of aircraft will will be more quiet so and we've heard about the federal move to to assess the way noise is measured so i think there's cause for some but on the other hand you know at hear from you and work with you going forward you're right yes thank you dennis j duffy from spruce street in watertown and first of all thank you very much for coming out it's important and i fly to reiterate what you've heard in that one of the most important things you can all do is make complaints there is a hotline number the massport when i was told don't be upset if they don't call you back in a month or two but they register all the calls and that's very important letters of calls i'm appreciative of all the accolades what i'd like to say that myron is the whiz guy on all this he knows fifty one hundred times more than i ever thought i could know and he's done a man's amount of work and it's a tough project and i feel your frustration i've been on spruce street for sixty six years and i'll tell you the sixty four they've been great the last two years i get woken up at eleven eleven thirty to wild to four o'clock in the morning and at my age i don't recover easy so i can understand the frustration and it's just sad that we have to go through this the cac meetings are a little rough in that we have the new guys on the block it's tough when you're going up against communities like might feel such a would well get in there and when i was saving the worst for last beverly north shore east boston i went through a van i have a little experience i work for i work in the house representatives for over thirty years and i worked for the state representative from winthrop prior to the representative now speak at the leo and i used to have to go on the census damages people's windows and have the thermal windows to me all fogged up because the noise the communities i mean they sent a letter and put it on an ad in the back of the goal some of the some of the remedies and some cities i just not available to us i think in indianapolis and maybe cincinnati they went out and bought all the property in around the airport to have the noise problems i don't think that's too practical in our area but again i'd like to thank all of you for coming i like to thank state representatives the state senate and then myron mean specially congresswoman claque as donnie yeoman's work on this and they're the people that really have to carry the ball because as you heard it's a federal issue and they don't really care about most state officials to be honest i mean let's face it that we don't get to vote for them they're not on the ballot and i leant in cambridge belmont to watertown so the f a they do what they want to do no because it's for the general see as i understand it started with winthrop benny's boston so i agree with watertown they look at us and island and belmont and watertown like what's wrong with you you have no idea what we've gone through so just shut up and be thankful you don't they have you didn't have to go through what we went through in the early days but this the cac is now the that we're talking about where a pot of is it is in its last phase into leo created  as as will knows an act and i don't know whether it's a good idea or a bad idea but there's a new cac coming which is a legislative enactment and a law which belmont and watertown is not part of there are several other communities that are out of the new cac and they talked about this a cac meeting which we have them at logan that presently there the the legislative cac is not meeting as yet we assume we're still in being so so for the years to come maybe there should be in the next little legislative session an amendment if you want a voice and to some degree we have this voice now but in the years ahead it may be the soul all be fixed but maybe only done belmont and want to town should be added to this act and they'll even does even a budget for i i i'm disillusioned to a point and pessimistic to a point of what we can do but i want to woodstock in the summer of sixty nine when we sit when we didn't have a phones we had lighters and we stood there five hundred thousand of us the singing give peace a chance  the operation out of the winter because my lawyer they chained themselves to each other on runways and you know i mean it was with a bit of an overplay but you know about it if they're yeah represented rodgers and but it out i don't the federal government can work wonders when and as ted kennedy did certainly for for the people and he's boston and winter which was a devastating if you weren't there i hate say it a devastating it's still terrible but this is i mean people's roofs were basically their chimneys were being taken off and it's terribly disruptive now here but all things are relative and within that i'm just trying to say i think maybe you know by exerting the political pressure exerting the public pressure publicity as i said i was on the other side i was reporter for the globe who covered this while living there you know and i think there are couple of many other avenues decker i hope it comes through again thanks ray thank you nancy so at this point there's no other comments will open up the floor for folks and if you could just line up at the so we are recording this for rebroadcast on i'll go media center so if you could go up to the microphone please make your comments that would be terrific and it seems to me if i understand everybody everybody is saying correctly the root cause here is that nowhere in the f a s mission is dealing with the real impact of the noise and the impact to people to property owners to residents their mission about noise if i understand it properly is limited to what i would call devastating catastrophic noise event as opposed to what the noise means to people and to fix this the a has become answerable well what they've described you know you're having your morning cup of coffee and all of a sudden less than a minute apart they start coming over your head it's happened to me one plane coming over your head it's one but when they keep on going that something else to the f a a needs to understand that rather than measuring the impact of one alcoholic beverage and say ah that wasn't too strong then you have to understand that you can't have a week's worth and one night and escape any benefits because that's really really what it boils down to it's not one of it it's when you cluster them together it has a different effect than just one into vidual look out and for them if if i understand this to have to care about this because they don't care about it now it seems there's got to be some change to their charter and i don't know what that means other than it was federal action now it's encouraging to hear that there's a but i do have a question about the caucus as we all know how washington operates i can say works operates these days the members of this caucus is it a bipartisan caucus or is it a it's democratic at this point and that is in part due to the representatives who tend to be elected and major urban metropolitan areas in the country tend to be democrat and though those that have their kind of representatives who are you know most likely to hear about these issues then be interested i will say that it's very new i mean it's only been you know month and a half formed and we're going into a new congress with you know new members i mean so i think there's potential to build on that i know there's already been staff level meetings and discussions of the caucus members so you know i think i'll stay in the optimistic  and i don't even know if they still do the kind of things that they did when i was there but they had to grow one that did acoustics and another that the human factor and i couldn't help thinking about some of the work that was done in b b and having to do with things like road noise but i actually think they dealt with aviation though and there may be some people around who have th who could be used maybe is volunteers to help formulate a model of the impact of these over flights the one after the other to ship with you know real people with field potential so an argument could be made that would be listened to that would be credible about you know what kind of metrics for the need to be considered when you do things like google the you john doyle from belmont stone road which is close to one of those are now full paths so it seemed to me that there's two issues here one is they are now have narrowing the paths but also which wasn't mentioned i don't think is the increased use of thirty three so from the date on nascar website the use of thirty three has gone up by a factor of two year to year the last two years they had full data  one common i had was so addressing those in order one comment i have is i believe that an hour which is essentially what was going on before although not directed found out it was kind of random found out but found out is is compatible with our now and so in my fantasy world of how government might work i mean simply putting into some bill that the the f a a consider fanout you know as a priority below some how to take ten thousand feet  in programming arnav you know would be totally reasonable i and i don't think it would cost well i don't know how much right writing slight differences in software cost but anything would cost too much given what they spent on are now already but my question is why did the use of thirty three go up so much in the past couple of years johnny the answer to that is in two thousand and eleven in two thousand and twelve thirty three was shut down for correct and to answer your second point fanning was something that was considered probably sometime between two thousand and eight and two thousand and thirteen prior to anybody from our communities being on the on the cac and it was actually objected to by closer in communities because it increases the amount of flight density so  fanning the fear and i'm not saying this was korea you know right or wrong but the fear of close in communities was that i fanning you could actually stack more flights into an hour or for a period of time and and it was rejected by the cac at that particular one time something that some of the c s c members regret but but it was considered and was and and was rejected hi my name's eliza peter i live on garfield street in watertown first thank you to everybody for your work on this especially to john hecht who is my neighbor and has been really tirelessly advocating for all of us and you've really refused to back down which i appreciate three  outside when i've been talking to a neighbor and i wonder who is monitoring that with the number of flights that we have going over our house with that's impacting our air quality more than it would be with a fan out pattern the second is the five twenty am flight that happens a lot and a lot of us have heard it i wonder i know will in one of your email updates you mention something about six am to look up and there's a time slot which started at six and i just wondered whether the five twenty flight was going against that agreed upon block or whether it was going around with the as part of the midnight to six am hours that we can't really have any control over but if there is some possibility of flights not starting before six if it's going to be in that pa over certain communities and the third one is with the new announcement about direct flights from boston expanding boston to be more of a metropolitan hub we've got is temple i think what john ten thirty at night is simple yeah like a massive massive thing i mean you can like wave to the pilot from our window with that one and now we've got hung kong and i think maybe beijing coming in the future or those all going to be from thirty three l and we going to be just having a midnight to six am the prescribed operation is had to had which means that they use whatever runway it is the goes out over the water and but that is not always available for whatever reasons and so there is no curfew at logan and there will be times when when air traffic control will direct flights on whatever runway they deem is necessary and you know you could check that but if there's a twenty or thirty mile an hour northwest wind and the airplane is above a certain weight i would suspect that they probably have to use thirty three  as was mentioned previously this is phase this is the first step of the phase three of the deal lands and so you know we are still discussing those and that we've got a meeting next week so people keep keep that it it's come up in the in the last meeting and and it was a lost on all of the the the representatives that these flights were starting to come in at or take off at he not only smiled and he said he could feel it on the skin one day and that was a really i'm standing but i was just i say he he was the form of veterans agent was retired and he was we were in cub  as her point about the the late night flights the international flights is i mean that's the sort of thing where you know can we be talking to the f a a about when you get these particular  you know confluence of factors you know big plane taking off slowly full of fuel because going a long ways late at night or early in the morning can there be some that be taken into account in the in varying the routes of those planes now you know when the wind comes the northwest of the plane is going to be taking off from thirty three  but why for instance can logan i think this is actually a mass for question be talking of turkish airlines about rescheduling that flight so it doesn't go over our heads so late at  night i mean these are the sorts of i it seems third there are particular problems that should be addressable through particular solutions even if we can't change our now of overall that's the kind of dialogue i think we have to be having with the f a a extra hi my name is rena freedman and i'm from cambridge i live off of fringe avenue and people in north cambridge certainly have been affected by this and and are disappointed with the changes i appreciate learning about so much here and appreciate all of your work i my questions are really from a personal what can we sitting here do to support your efforts i log my complaints and i encourage my neighbors to do so as well it's t v assist to do so it's inconvenient and i wonder can someone create an app that will make it easier to buy you know to hit your button and on know it's you and your logon and just it'll register it how can we would it be helpful to broaden how do we reach other people who could also register their complaints and register their support also whether  petition in some way i don't know how things work i think a lot of people do care about it when i talk to my neighbor some people initially say oh i didn't notice that and then they immediately starts pattern as well once they clue in they can't stop seeking help so my question is i know that it's not about individuals liking complaints but about a number of people not the number of times by any one individual do you have suggestions for what we as individuals households might do towards that is there anything we can do to canvass more broadly through social media or door to door support any sort of grassroots work to support that and also you mentioned some in n h and public notifications how does one see those because i'm not aware of how i would find out i only found out about this last night just by chance so how do we find out to keep informed so to answer the first question i got a pool started about a year ago of google group and i think that most a lot of the people who contact us either from cambridge or arlington are pointed to that group to try to communicate and and work together so i think that you know utilizing  social media taking a look at what the folks in melbourne have done you know is something that certainly would would would be beneficial in continuing to work on it's a small group but i think that you know the the the  more more voices will lead to and one of the things a mass court looks at and this is i guess i would want to discourage anybody that wants to make one hundred complaints a month but they look at individual  addresses and the person who lied logs one hundred complaints a month quite honestly it isn't really taken seriously so the more important and there  i've gone on her group of made some efforts to try to increase the number of people who who have have complained so i think looking at what other communities in new either in other regions or  e folks have done it understanding that unfortunately there are no common necessarily common interests always between people in different in different communities but between arlington cambridge belmont watertown i think that there's an opportunity to do that for sure quiet online and will share that list with the guy and i would just add i mean if you have lots of neighbors who are getting interested in this i mean have them get on our e mail distribution list as well and you know if they want to get together in somebod living room or whatever and i'm sure some or all of us would be happy to come and talk to them as well i mean i think that's what we need to do we need to grow the constituency of people who are concerned about this so whatever you think would work for them whether it's social media as they're busy you prefer to plug in that way or if they want to be face to face just let us not forget or know how much i was in there so it was thanksgiving last to go in the exact same route now is who each time is that really what they're doing because you can perceive from the ground it seems like the altitude varies a lot and you can really tell the difference that the altitude when they're higher is much but you know with the noise drops off with the chub group of the radios or something so it just is really else do we really have requirements in terms of the necessary altitude and on the new york airports after certain hours charles are told are required to climb to certain height by certain time what's going on and in that regard for speech yeah i think that actually these guys who went up into the tower i think it is a pilot discretion to a large extent whether they program it and going on a pilot or whether they decide to you know take the controls but oh well this is a common question i don't have a one hundred percent clear answer on but the conversation that i've had is that they generally the pilots preference is to get as high as fat as they can as soon as possible because that as they get to a higher level then there's less air resistance and they may get better mileage and but on the the variation in altitude if you go to my web site in the you go to airplanes and you scroll down a there's a there's a thing on the where it has all the data from for the flights over iata adriana's house you know that we have all the altitude for those flights and you can see what the variation is there is some variation but if the noise level goes down as the square root of the distance so it's less of an impact than you would think rather than more of an impact you know the exponentiation is the other direction so you know twice as high is only forty percent lower that is less what's what's what's relevant is the surface which expands as the square and then if it's that much bigger than the density on that surface is the square root of what it was so it's it's it's it's  over the course of you know really use these paths for a month or even a year and then say they plan on the date it's going to change and then they're going to change it for again the next month or year but such that the pain is spread around a little bit is it not possible to change it at all because that's where they just decided to do it a couple years ago or in fact is there the ability to tune in and change it on an orderly basis so it can actually vary a little bit yeah i think it's a great question one that i've asked a number of times but i think the the the answer is is it possible sure i mean it's technology and if we if there's a desire i think that that that they could do it is a practical and what would be the cost of of doing it i don't i don't know you know it is an inner related network and so once they pick a particular border that they would apply so it would be great if again there could be a way to introduce variability but i think there's going to be resistance whether it's real or  an interesting thing if you wanted to understand part of the challenge that we're dealing with there is there was a hearing of i think two weeks ago that congressional hearing  reauthorization you should be able to find it on and on you tube or whatever and if you looked at that or listens to the discussion of the challenges that they that those people were discussing about next gen and overspending and the implementation challenges you know i think showing up and asking for a software change to to modify flight paths is probably pretty low on some of the issues that least they're dealing with of the f a a level you know this little small software change to the health care website right now i'm just saying software changes there's no much difference in a big perceived noise and if you double the distance you do get a four time reduction in sound energy but that's the log thing that means that it doesn't make that much difference to the year because it's that log of the yeah and i think that you know to to to john's point i think that one in order to have what it what we're all hoping is the have a rational discussion with the f a a about what the possibilities are and i think that the it's even with the dialogue there's hope to have some sort of compromise we just to today have not been able to have that constructive dialogue so that's what we're all hoping we get t issue so i think we should be concentrating on mass or and money my money i mean i don't understand why we're not charging people more to do things outside of the curfew i don't understand why we're not charging i don't understand why we're not charging more for the more expensive older louder engines so i think we would get farther and faster with massport i'm not saying you know don't do the f a a stuff i'm just saying on a local level we could effect it was sheer economics you know if you charge a stem bull i have no idea of the metrics involved but if you charge them a lot more for going out after ten faster than actual legislation which does tend to be very slow thank you i think that's a great point and i don't know where the line of demarcation is between you know mass board and the something that's worth worth exploring and i can i can tell you that there it is encouraging there are very few of the noisy planes left it's the that because there's such a strong incentive for the is there more fuel efficient too in europe winds are so driven by fuel efficiency that that there's been a big movement and the mass ports been very actually aggressive in that or so they say to us in terms of pushing the airlines to use the more efficient planes there are a few ones left and those are the ones you hear you know maybe maybe that fed ex plane in the mall in the you know in the middle of the night that that's really disruptive but we'll try to get a little bit more on the the due to the you know the the litigation that predates the next gen are now process because of this bland study that's ongoing in that form the cac and other things this is why we're getting this testing for you know varying their runway usage within their small this window and i think that is an opportunity for all of us to put you know to continue especially through our cac wraps to continue to be paid very close attention to what tests are being ordered during phase three and when and what the results of the test mean in terms of whether or not changes would be made permanently or the mean everyone i'm i'm clearly pretty distraught about this issue as many people here are and i thank you for your service i do have a couple of questions one is that i notice in all the documentation and the the kind of framing and justification for our now have includes reference to increasing air safety now i buy that this is making the folks jobs in the tower easier and i buy this is making things more efficient but is there any evidence that the prior flight paths were unsafe  me this strikes me as a as a savvy political way to frame an issue because who's going to be against air safety absolutely no one is there any evidence that the former flight paths were unsafe know not that not that i know of other than i go yes the you know one could make the logical argument that having narrow you know having planes that are in a more predictable  e is better than having more of them but i don't know what i'm sure that if somewhere buried in and i've read stacks of f a a documents that somewhere somebody did between making the job of the here traffic death rollers easier and maybe flying safe than i would i would i would say that strongly i personally find a very credible i believe that this is safer i mean the airline intensity of focus of you know the human beings up in those towers and then actually you know for all the automation they have up there you know they actually have these sort of tiles that they hand from each other one to each other so good now you've got this plane it's over so they have it it's a good for all the automation humans are running this process and if you can say to somebody you know ninety minutes before their flight ok you're going to go to waypoint one at waypoint two and waypoint three and see a later and that's the last thing you really have to say to them other than you know cleared for takeoff that's a beautiful thing but if you have to say ok you know vector left the vector right and more while you're out of the space the number of touches that you have to make to that process reducing the number of touches i think it's a big deal and so i personally from my observation do find a credible this is a safer so i find it credible that it's a safer system i'm just not sure that the previous system was problematically unsafe  sad to me it is not that i i think it's very much worth of the progress but the other thing that you have is that it's all part of a flow management thing you know so in the old days if you remember you'd fly you  to you they would just take off a soon as they could they get into something you know to the new york airspace and you fly around the guardia you might do you know three or four loops until they finally had to touch down it's over now they've nothing manage it much better it's more there's a national sort of flow management system along these routes so you're going to take you know you're going to do a ground hold until they know that you know you're the flow into logan is going to allow you to land so there's a whole lot of things that reduce the the opportunities for error in the way they've evolved this system so i am impressed to be honest with you and i think i'm sorry to interrupt i mean i think it's also it's also a question of we're trying to figure out what is the you know what is the marginal improvement in safety and at what cost does that come in terms of other important things so i mean that's what it was i was talking about was you're trying to find what what's an appropriate balance and i'm sure there are things we could do to make it safer still but probably then there'd be fewer flights and we don't want to do that because people need to fly i mean so there are a lot of different factors that need to be weighed and one of them is the is the impact on the communities and thank you  my second thought is kind of a variation on a theme that a neighbor from don raised and that's not necessarily introducing variation to the concentrated flight paths but changing the concentrated flight paths a month scott three when i look at that map i see lots of other communities that are just a little bit to the north of us just a little bit to the east of us just a little bit to the south of us that don't have any so whether or not it's possible to vary them from month to month or year to year i don't know but what about just physically changing them how about we take one and you know like winchester carlisle concord lexington woburn eastern cambridge you know something that would go down through brookline allston bright and i'm not going to make any friends with this comment but it seems like disproportionately got concentrated roots off for me there was an era of what about changing the roots like it to me that would make a big difference and it seems like we have had and unfortunately we're playing we're reliving with the results of decisions that were made really without our participation so you know they're all valid questions as to you know i do believe a lot of thought went into not i believe you can go take a look at it you can go to the the the the links are on our website of all of the hearings and justifications and there's you know reams and reams of documents that you can take a look at where they did explore different paths and there was some negotiation as to how they ended up on these and you know it's i don't think it's lost on anybody that  rethinking the noise models yes because i think the f a a will say you know i've heard them say it but they they picked the perfect routes in terms of what their models told them about noise impacts the think you need to get them to rethink their their their noise model before they would be open to rethinking the optimal or possible are never i completely agree and that brings me to my next point and i promise i won't stay up here all night and filibuster but i really so my field is education research and so we have some real bad metrics in education research but the d n a like takes the cake i mean that's a horrible metric that is i have no problem with that being used as  threshold for determining abatement keep it there for influencing abatement what we needed is the introduction of a new threshold that identifies a compromised quality of life and that i think has to be subjective and qualitative and gathered through talking with people in community b communities about their experience with noise and it also has to be a relative measure not an absolute one if you imagine two communities where the  d l is forty five when the flights are going nonstop and when the flights aren't going nonstop it's forty those communities are going to notice the noise a lot less than a community like belmont where you know the d l might be fifty five when the flights are in use but it's so quiet here and wonderful when the flights are news is that relative difference that really makes it noticeable to us so these things i think have to be taken into account when they reconsider how noise affects people i mean to end will do you know what the average noise level in belmont is when thirty three l is not being used i believe the ambiance in the mid forty's or something it's it's higher than you might think i mean but you have just to give you contrast the ambient noise if you stand out and i was doing but dealing with noise complaints about some construction projects in fenway   here it's about forty five that's wildly lower and you know it's but you know take it out of the fifty five and having those first yeah it you're absolutely right the that it stands out a heck of a lot more yeah now for what it's worth i mean this was a night time thing i borrowed our department of health you know decimal reader for a few weeks around my house i live right under the water town branch at night the ambient noise levels around between thirty five thirty five thirty seven yeah and then when those big planes would come over you know would have mid sixty's high sixty's right that's a huge jump huge i mean it's exactly what you're talking about huge shown goodwill of just a just a couple of other you know thoughts we talked about  book by the way just i'm not sure i have that number right but it is in the study that that they did and so that's available it is on my website they're free thank you you know the head to it what's the reason the head to head route can't be used more regularly is it a volume issue like a flayed volume issue yeah it's a safety issue so i wonder either be possible just expands to like you know ten to seven ten pm to seven and expand the hours in which to head to head the preferred head to head i realize it won't always be possible but the preferred head to head zone is is this tied to you know i think one of the interesting things here is another thing  you know we're not obsolete we're not people not you know ok i'm going to minneapolis on going to go via chicago and chicago is going to a lot of traffic in the middle the day i know where we're a destination point or a starting point and so our traffic is it's rush hour traffic you know our through our  rush hour is you know five six seven eight am and then same thing in the in the evening so it's hard to make it hard to expand the yeah yeah i think it's just the volume if you go take a look at the mass board site  you know just on arrivals and departures it starts at about six am and the bottom of the traffic volume gets to be pretty substantial pretty quickly early so he well i hate to buy it i just did yeah to flight paths from the old days it looks like the spread is about a mile or a half mile or so the same distance that you know will your calculations suggest wouldn't you know kind of be particularly notable to  try to rattled off are here but honestly that is what the numbers concert just adrianople i leave on a louise road and try to be very quick i created the google group that's called quiet belmont and so if you want to get on then that's fine so a couple of things the complaints i haven't been able to file complain since the new system was implemented by the massport there are a lot of issues with the his historical plight say you try to log in and to you know look what happened in the last half an hour or so and nothing shows up so i don't know where we asked this question and how do we figure out how to make it work i am pretty good with computers but this is not working for me before was very simple you clicked on the on the flight it gave you the altitude and everything to read able to file a complaint immediately no not so much so that's one issue the other thing somebody was asking what do we do to help people when there are a lot of flights on a weekend what we used to do is walk our neighborhood and distribute flyers and say look this is what you do when there are many flights sell you can do that  i think the point that remains here and from everything we discussed most of you know i grew up in romania i experienced totalitarian regime firsthand so what i'm saying now now i'm going to i'm a poet to say no i'm not saying it lightly the f a a to me is a pocket of the of a totalitarian unit in the midst of the best democracy on earth and i find that very disturbing and i find that it's troubling that nobody is seeing this and addressing it as such it's a unit with absolute power it's that's just not ok one you don't have a job description given by congress for the f a a that says well you've got to take care of the people to not only the airplanes right so how do we introduce that point that should be there i mean i am a total media member i democracy yet at work how is this possible and hollow is a possible that we say oh it's hard it's a slow process it's got take a short it has a hollow do we not recognize this and go ballistic to address it immediately that's what i don't understand i think that should be a focus and the other thing that's amazing it's isn't our tax money am i not paying for this for the  this wrong i don't know have i not voted for the people who gave the f a a the directive to save fuel and do the our now have but you know it's a it's a vicious circle i mean it really is going to  go in a circle it's the people i elected that are in d c they gave the f a a this directive if they did their job i mean they had their homework done beautifully because it doesn't say anything that they should care about me so really i'm collateral damage and they probably take this in a column i don't know it's not ok this should be changed i think i mean this should be a point there and say look you need to sit down at a table with the community it's something you need to hear from there not say ok you know i don't care or hair we have leverage now because they have to be a real authorized you know and there's this window of opportunity is just i think it's a lacking in the system and i think that should be addressed in my opinion but so