Unless it bookends a seminal work of early ambient '90s house music, the deafening roar of an airplane is an excruciating intrusion into the human skull. Today the Post reports what the FAA's infamous Tennis Climb has wrought: 21,000 noise complaints in a year and a half to the Port Authority, a large portion coming from Canterbury Lane in Nassau County, 12 miles from JFK.
The Tennis Climb is a landing route that was first employed more than 20 years ago as a way to mitigate the noise over Arthur Ashe Stadium during the U.S. Open. In 2012, the FAA began to tinker with a version of the Tennis Climb and made it permanent in order to free up more space at JFK. Now Nassau County residents like Joshua Weiner greet the noise nearly every waking hour of every day: “It starts early in the morning. Some evenings it goes well into the 10 or 11 o’clock hour.”
Meanwhile, in Bayside, the president of Queens Quiet Skies, Janet McEneaney, said the planes are present every twenty seconds from 6 a.m. to midnight: “If you’ve ever had an earache or a toothache, you can’t think of anything else. That’s what it’s like.”
The Port Authority says that it's working with the FAA “to address resident noise concerns through the placement of noise monitors in and around our airports," but the mayor of East Hills in Nassau, Michael Koblenz, says the agencies just shrug off the complaints. “We’ve been doing this for a couple of years already. Nothing’s happened.”
