The clock is ticking for residents living around Bob Hope Airport to tap a federally funded program to soundproof their houses before a shrinking noise-impact zone renders them ineligible, officials warned last week.
With fewer flights coming in and out of the airfield, and quieter aircraft taking to the skies, the noise-impact zone is expected to shrink significantly at the north and south ends of the runway, meaning homeowners who currently qualify for grant-funded soundproofing may soon find themselves outside the boundaries for the program.Dan Feger, the airport’s executive director, said homeowners who qualify should act quickly.
“It absolutely screams that the people who have the opportunity right now should take advantage of it because in all likelihood funding for that will go away,” Feger said at a meeting of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority last week.
A draft of the so-called noise-impact forecast now goes to the Federal Aviation Administration, which has six months to review it.
Since the launch of the soundproofing program, 2,356 single- and multi-family dwellings have undergone improvements, and the owners of 357 residential units have expressed interest, airport officials said last
month.
Those homes have gotten soundproofing improvements, such as double-paned windows, new doors and insulation.
But the owners of 1,926 eligible dwellings have either not participated or expressed interest, despite mailings and personal visits, officials said.
Meanwhile, the shrinking boundaries of the noise-impact area don’t bode well for Bob Hope Airport in other ways because it takes into account little to no rebound from falling passenger figures, which have hurt revenues.
“The forecast is very flat for this airport,” said David Fritz, of David Fitz and Coffman Associates, which conducted the forecast
Currently, the airfield logs about 123,000 operations annually, which include flights by commercial planes, cargo aircraft, private planes and helicopters.
By 2017, the study projects that number will rise to just 141,000 total flights. Fitz said that when the last noise-impact study was done in 1998, there were 184,500 total flights a year at Bob Hope Airport.
“So there’s a big, big drop-off in the number of operations,” he said.
