The tourist helicopters that are giving one Brooklyn Heights resident Vietnam flashbacks and other Brooklyn Heights residents Grand Canyon vacation flashbacks are here to stay, says Mayor Bloomberg. Local politicians have been pressuring Bloomberg to ban tourist flights from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, which is opposite Brooklyn Heights, but yesterday a mayoral spokesman shot them all down.
"Since the FAA, not the city, controls the air space, suspending tourist helicopter flights at local heliports would not eliminate traffic or noise but instead would simply shift departures to New Jersey and Nassau County," spokesman Andrew Brent told the Daily News. The Bloomberg administration claims the helicopter business, which brings in approximately $50 million a year, is simply too big to stifle. But Brent insists the mayor "would continue to work" with the community to do something about the cacophony, which has only gotten worse since a helipad on the West Side of Manhattan shut down by a judge's order.
Complaints about the helicopters have soared with the opening of the new sections of Brooklyn Bridge Park. 70 percent of the helicopter flights that take off from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport are tourist flights, and despite a no-fly zone imposed over Brooklyn Heights, local residents say the noise pollution is relentless. "I’m having flashbacks because it sounds exactly like being back in Vietnam again,” one Red Hook resident, a Vietnam Veteran, told the Brooklyn Paper. "These choppers are every five minutes." And really, how can anybody enjoy Brooklyn Bridge Park with all this Agent Orange everywhere?
