CHARLOTTE — A Charlotte city councilmember is questioning whether the public has been informed enough of potential changes to air traffic patterns ahead of a scheduled Dec. 9 vote. At Monday night’s Charlotte City Council meeting, aviation director Haley Gentry presented a map that showed the current flight patterns and the potential changes.
It is hard to pinpoint exact neighborhoods and landmarks on the map. Gentry told councilmembers it was created after briefing Charlotte city councilmembers. While that map didn’t exist until recently, an airport spokesperson said boundary proposals have been available to view on the Part 150 website and during community meetings.
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The current and potential changes map that was shown to Charlotte City Council Monday night was hard to read. Councilmember Renee Johnson couldn’t believe it.
“Can we have street names? Can we have landmarks? Can we have something so that the everyday person, the residents, the folks who are busy going to work every day, who don’t have time to attend all the community meetings and all of these pre-meetings can have knowledge about this?” she said.
According to the airport, the Part 150 Study recommends implementing new diverging headings on departure runways to disperse aircraft. On Monday, Charlotte City Council is voting to send recommendations to the FAA for further study. This has been a multi-year process.
But Johnson questions whether enough people are informed about the potential changes.
“It’s not engineers speaking with other engineers,” she said. “I think that the public has a right to know how they’re going to be impacted by this decision.”
Air traffic controllers say Part 150 will improve safety and efficiency at the airport. The new flight patterns will spread the noise around and make sure planes aren’t sitting on the ground for long periods of time burning gas.
“It’s not flying over the same person’s house every day,” air traffic controller Chris Riddle said. “It allows us to disperse the noise throughout the community and that is one of the things the community has asked for.”
Nothing will take effect until the new runway is in place in 2027. While there have been some community meetings, more can be expected in the months and years to come.
“If city council approves this step, it takes us to the next step and it opens us up to improve safety and disperse the noise,” retired air traffic controller Bob Symkiewicz said.
According to a spokesperson for the airport, Part 150 recommends eliminating the “fly runway heading for two miles” procedure which has been in place since 1978 and is no longer considered a best practice by FAA Air Traffic Control.
Simply put, Symkiewicz says right now planes are flying, at times, just 3,500 feet apart from each other for 2 or 3 miles. Once this is in place, the planes will be able to turn away from each other as soon as they reach the end of the runway, eliminating the chance of them turning into each other.