Traffic to and from East Hampton Town Airport this past summer was up 8.3 percent over 2025, the developer of a flight tracking platform told the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee on Saturday, but “the big headline is helicopter traffic was up 26.9 percent versus 2025,” he said.
Marc Frons of the committee, a former chief technical officer of The New York Times and News Corp, built JPXWatch to independently track flights to and from the airport by aircraft type, altitude, time of day, and seasonal pattern. “JPX” is the shorthand code for the airport.
In June, July, and August, jet traffic was also up over 2025, by 6.3 percent, he said. Curfew operations — takeoffs or landings between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. — were up by 30 percent, “but that’s off a fairly low base, so pretty broad curfew compliance, but there were still 155 curfew operations.” Abiding by the curfew, he added, is voluntary.
“We counted 11 days with over 200 flight operations over the summer, versus seven in 2025,” Mr. Frons said. An operation is defined as a takeoff or a landing.
According to the town’s statistics, last summer was the airport’s busiest since 2019, he said, with 16,432 operations counted in June, July, and August. Of those, 4,308 were helicopters, up from 3,394 in the same period in 2025. “So helicopters were the story of the season,” he said. Ninety percent of the helicopters flying in and out of JPX are either the Sikorsky S-76 or the Bell 407, which he said are Stage 2 helicopters, quieter than Stage 1 models but louder than the modern Stage 3 standard.
JPXWatch incorporates data from FlightAware, a tracking company. “It’s good data as far as it goes,” Mr. Frons said, “but it only captures roughly 75 percent of the town’s actual data.” FlightAware does not necessarily pick up very low-flying aircraft, he said. “I’ve asked the town for access to more granular data. I’m still waiting to hear back, but that would give us the ability to cross-check and then close that gap.”
A network of five receivers around the airport is “almost fully operational,” Mr. Frons said, with two in Wainscott and one each in East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and Bridgehampton, “which from this month has allowed us to close that gap to close to 98 percent, because we’re able to pick up a lot of this low-flying aircraft on these receivers. . . . We’re still testing it out to make sure that it’s all accurate, but we’re trying to close that gap.”
“Between FlightAware, our own network of receivers, and the town, we think if we can get all that from JPXWatch, we’ll have a very minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, granular and historical record of who’s flying where, who they are, what time they’re flying, how noisy it is,” Mr. Frons said. He has one more receiver that has yet to be deployed. “I’m looking for volunteers,” he said. “If you’ve got a nice roof that has a nice view of the airport, you’re our guy.”
JPXWatch has launched a daily brief during the busy season “which talks about what’s happened at the airport the day before,” and a weekly email newsletter will soon be introduced. “You can see what’s flying over your house and over any time period” as well as various aircraft altitudes, Mr. Frons said. A JPXWatch mobile app will be available by next summer, he said.
Responding to residents’ complaints about incessant traffic, pollution, and the noise from jets and helicopters in particular, the town planned to briefly close the airport in 2022, during which it was to transition from a public airport to one operating under a prior-permission-required framework and with new restrictions on aircraft operations. At the 11th hour, however, a New York State Supreme Court Justice blocked the plan. “We’re not allowed to make any changes,” Councilwoman Cate Rogers, the town board’s liaison to the Wainscott citizens committee, said on Saturday.
“The town is in a box,” Mr. Frons said. The town board was in the process of preparing an analysis, known as a Part 161 study, that airports must perform when proposing local noise or operational restrictions to the Federal Aviation Administration, when the court imposed a temporary restraining order. “It’s a very long process,” Mr. Frons said. “It’s a very expensive process, and hardly anybody across this country has been successful pursuing it, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. . . . That path is still open to the town if they want to take it. One of my recommendations is we need optionality around the airport. Our hands may be tied today in many ways. They won’t be tied forever.”
He recommended that the town fund a scoped Part 161 feasibility assessment and complete an environmental review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. It should support the town’s sharing of the Vector Airport Systems’ Intuitive Noise and Operations Management System data with JPXWatch, he said. It should also ask the Federal Aviation Administration what will follow in the wake of the July 29 expiration of the mandatory North Shore Helicopter Route, under which helicopter pilots flying under visual flight rules along Long Island’s northern coast were required to stay approximately one mile offshore over the Long Island Sound at a minimum altitude of 2,500 feet. And it should ask the airport director to report corridor use, as three in four arrivals last summer used a corridor the town does not prefer.
“The community needs to understand what is happening at the airport and how it can change and how it has changed,” Mr. Frons said, “because as everybody knows, it’s not going to get any less crowded out here.”
