While frustrated residents in Wainscott and elsewhere continue to bemoan the air traffic and noise associated with East Hampton Town Airport, the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee heard from the developer of a public data platform that tracks every flight to and from the airport, with noise impact modeled down to individual properties, when it met by video conference on Saturday.
Developed by Marc Frons of the committee, a former chief technology officer of The New York Times and News Corp, JPXWatch.org uses data from FlightAware, which provides real-time, historical, and predictive flight tracking to map every operation at East Hampton Town Airport by aircraft type, altitude, time of day, and seasonal pattern. But “we have a lot of personalized features,” Mr. Frons told The Star about JPXWatch.org, such as the “My Home” feature, which allows users to enter any East End address and see a personalized view of flights over the property, including altitude profiles and a noise exposure score compared against every other point on the East End.
The site features dedicated dashboards for aircraft widely considered most objectionable due to noise — helicopters, seaplanes, and jets — as well as a news section tracking legal and settlement developments. The site is specific to the airport here, and “we have much more detailed and, in my opinion, better maps that show flight trails” than does FlightAware, Mr. Frons said.
In 2022, following the expiration of federal grant assurances the previous year, the town board planned to briefly close the airport before opening a “new” private airport on the site operating under a prior-permission-required framework and with new restrictions on aircraft operations in place. These would have limited aircraft operators to one takeoff and one landing per day. Restrictions based on the size and noise of aircraft would have been imposed, and aircraft operations would have been subject to curfews.
The restrictions and curfews were aimed at alleviating residents’ complaints, which had soared in tandem with aircraft operations, particularly helicopter travel to and from New York City. A New York State Supreme Court justice, however, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the town from enacting that plan, following oral arguments in three parallel lawsuits challenging it.
“There’s hard-truth data in here,” Mr. Frons told the committee about JPXWatch.org, but also “estimates based on methodology for noise, because the town does not yet have physical noise monitoring stations around the airport,” as many airports of similar size have and which would provide “actual sound ratings, rather than computations based on terrain and altitude and aircraft type, which is the way we’re doing it now.”
Mr. Frons demonstrated JPXWatch.org to Jim Brundige, the airport manager, along with Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, Councilwoman Cate Rogers, who is the committee’s liaison to the town board, and Hersey Egginton, the committee’s chairman, on March 23. Ms. Rogers told the committee on Saturday that noise-monitoring equipment has been “very preliminarily” discussed and that the town is open to further discussion.
In January, the Wainscott committee endorsed a plan presented by Mr. Frons that asserts that viable pathways to imposing restrictions exist and can be achieved, identifying “practical steps the town can take” to implement “meaningful progress on airport noise while avoiding the procedural missteps that derailed previous efforts.”
In December, an attorney for the Coalition to Transform East Hampton Airport, which is directed by Barry Raebeck of the committee, sent a letter to the town outlining what Mr. Raebeck said were available options to reduce the airport’s impact on residents. Within a three-tiered action plan, immediate steps included calls for a “public dashboard,” which now exists in the form of JPXWatch.org.
On Saturday, Mr. Egginton said that Mr. Frons had recently heard from Kathryn Slye of the East Hampton Aviation Association, a pilot who has been sharply critical of plans to close the airport or restrict operations. They are to meet, Mr. Egginton said, for the purpose of “reaching agreement on data sources and data accuracy. The whole purpose of the dashboard is for community service, community information, so we want to be sure that the information that’s on the site is accurate to the best of the information that’s out there.”
“We’re all on board with helping Marc refine the website to ensure that we have really accurate information and that it’s fact-based and science-based,” said Ms. Slye, who also attended Saturday’s virtual meeting.
“We’ll make adjustments as necessary,” Mr. Frons said. “We want this to be a dashboard that serves the entire community, which includes the operators and aviation folks as well as residents who just have planes fly over their house. I’m sure we can come to an agreement on what’s factual and what isn’t.”
