Stop the flight schools and Flagler County Commission from ruining our neighborhoods and quality of life.

Please

stop!!

Flight Schools Are Ruining Palm Coast And Flagler County

Flight school airplanes fly over our homes day and night causing:

Constant noise

Potential safety hazards to our homes and families

Depressed home values due to planes constantly overhead

Flight schools refuse to stop flying over our homes, even though they could fly over unpopulated areas. They fly constantly over our neighborhoods, without regard to the negative impact their actions have on the quality of life in Palm Coast and Flagler County. Our County Commission recruits these flight schools to fly over Palm Coast and Flagler County. Neither the flight schools nor County officials care about the rights of citizens to enjoy their homes in peace, quiet and relative safety.

Why does constant flight school training over Palm Coast and Flagler County matter?

The peace and quiet of Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s communities, and the potential safety of homes and families, are being negatively impacted by flight school airplanes that fly continually over populated neighborhoods.

Continual airplane noise disrupts the quality of life during most hours of the day and into the night. Enjoying peace and quiet in Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s neighborhoods has become a thing of the past. The roar and drone of flight school airplanes is almost always present. The noise from one propeller plane can be heard by hundreds or thousands of people at any given moment in time. So just one plane can cause a lot of disruption, not to mention the disruption caused by several planes in Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s skies at the same time.

And the large majority of the planes flying over homes are flight school planes. In fact, of the estimated 200,000 takeoffs and landings per year at Flagler County Airport, at least 75% are flight school aircraft. Plus, flight school planes do not just pass over neighborhoods in 15-30 seconds, like most business aircraft. Flight school airplanes perform maneuvers over homes for extended periods of time. This not only creates a substantial amount of noise pollution, but also increases risk.

Given the noise and safety issues, why don’t flight schools train over the ocean to the east, or over areas to the west of Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s population centers? Why do they train over homes? Don’t the flight schools care about the impact on the citizens? Apparently, the flight schools do not like to fly over the ocean in case one of their planes goes down. Being over homes is considered safer -- at least for the flight crew. It’s great to protect the flight crew, but what about the lives of families and the safety of homes?

Not only does flight training create ever present noise, the constant plane traffic over Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s neighborhoods also raises safety concerns for homes and families. While flight schools provide certified instructors for training flights, some instructors are quite young. Student pilots also fly solo as part of their training. In any case, as the tragic July 2007 crash in Sanford vividly demonstrated, even small planes with experienced pilots do crash, sometimes destroying homes and lives.

The heavy concentration of flight school planes in Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s skies increases the risk of a plane going down over a neighborhood, potentially causing property damage and loss of life. This is not conjecture, just common sense. The more planes overhead, and the longer they are overhead, the greater the chance that either a single plane or multiple plane mishap will occur.

Newspapers have articles all of the time about small planes crashing. In fact, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in the last 20 years in the United States, nearly 12,000 people have died in small-plane accidents. And sometimes these accidents are mid-air collisions. For instance, in 1999, a mid-air collision occurred in DeLand, Florida involving two flight school planes: An Embry-Riddle plane (with a 22-year old flight instructor) collided with a Phoenix East Aviation plane. Both instructors were killed, as were both students. Fortunately, no one on the ground was hurt.

So, flight school planes training over Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s communities do increase the risk of a tragedy happening to one or more citizens on the ground. If flight schools did not train over homes this risk to citizens would be effectively eliminated.

Flight school training over populated neighborhoods decreases the quality of life in Palm Coast and Flagler County, and makes living in Palm Coast and Flagler County less desirable. Even if the potential hazard overhead is ignored, it is not pleasant to hear the roar and drone of planes continually. Not only is this detrimental to enjoying life in Palm Coast and Flagler County, it also results in decreased home values. Once again, this is not conjecture, just common sense. The less desirable a community, the lower the real estate values. And constant flight school planes flying over neighborhoods makes Palm Coast and Flagler County less desirable places to live.

Unfortunately, flight schools insist on conducting flight training over populated areas, even though areas to the east and west of Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s population centers are available for their use. Flight schools could easily train over the ocean or areas to the west of Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s populated areas, and not expose the citizens to the noise pollution and potential hazards of their flight training. But they refuse to do so.

What about government officials taking action to protect citizens and property values? Not only have the Flagler County Commissioners not done anything to persuade the flight schools to conduct their training over unpopulated areas, they actually recruited a major flight school to locate at Flagler County Airport. And they actively encourage other flight schools to use the Airport as much as possible.

In fact, the Flagler County Commission actually constructed a 19,000 square foot facility for use by the flight school they recruited, to entice them to locate at Flagler County Airport.

Simply put, Palm Coast and Flagler County are becoming undesirable places to live because of the flight schools. And people do not like to buy homes in undesirable communities.

The future looks bleak. While the flight schools could conduct their training over unpopulated areas, they refuse to do so. The largest flight school located at Flagler County Airport (CAPT LLC) is expanding (see below). Recently, they recruited a large class of foreign students. And it appears that the Volusia County-based flight schools (primarily Embry-Riddle and Phoenix East Aviation) will continue to dump their flight training traffic into Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s skies and over homes and families.

The County Commissioners are also extending the runway at the County Airport so it can handle larger planes, and there is discussion of setting up a Custom’s Office so the Airport can handle international flights. Just what Palm Coast and Flagler County need, more and larger planes. The fact that Palm Coast and Flagler County are only thirty minutes from underutilized Daytona Beach International Airport, which has a long runway and can handle all this traffic, should certainly be good enough for any non-flight school businesses that are considering locating to Palm Coast or Flagler County.

It appears that the Flagler County Commission wants Flagler County Airport operations to grow, including flight school operations, at any cost to the quality of life once enjoyed by the citizens of Palm Coast and Flagler County, and with little or no regard to the safety issues or quality of life issues caused by constant flight training over neighborhoods.

The flight schools and government officials know that flight training negatively impacts the citizens of Palm Coast and Flagler County, yet they refuse to stop flight training over populated areas. In Palm Coast and Flagler County it seems the flight schools have a “green light” to do as they please, without regard to the rights of citizens to enjoy their homes in peace, quiet and relative safety.

Embry-Riddle, CAPT LLC and Phoenix East Aviation are the largest flight schools flying over Palm Coast and Flagler County, with Embry-Riddle the largest. Embry-Riddle and Phoenix East are located at Daytona Beach International Airport, but they choose to use Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s neighborhood skies as their training ground. CAPT LLC is headquartered at Flagler County Airport in the facility constructed for CAPT LLC by the Flagler County Commission to entice them to locate in Flagler County.

Each of these flight schools has been asked to stop training flights over our neighborhoods. None of them have stopped. Listed to the right are the people responsible for making those decisions.

Other smaller flight schools also fly over Palm Coast’s and Flagler County’s neighborhoods. Many of these flight schools are based at Flagler County Airport and were encouraged to locate at the airport by Flagler County Government officials. The Flagler County Government and Flagler County Airport Administration continue to recruit flight schools, and encourage expansion of existing flight school operations, that will result in more planes over neighborhoods and increased noise and safety concerns.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Univ.

John Johnson

President of Embry-Riddle

Ken Byrnes

Flight Department Chairman

CAPT LLC – Closed

CAPT LLC recently abandoned their Flagler County facility after not honoring their commitments to over a hundred Chinese students they recruited to their flight school program. The County Commission’s recruitment of this flight school proved to be an embarrassment to the County’s reputation, as well as a “disaster” for the Chinese Students and the citizens of Flagler County.

Please do not recruit another flight school to Flagler County Airport.

Phoenix East Aviation

Spence Edwards

President

Ghassan Reslan

CEO

It is assumed that each of these organizations and individuals consider themselves to be responsible citizens.

Perhaps their own self interests have clouded their judgement.

Flight schools are also negatively impacting the quality of life in other local communities. Visit the web site below to see what they are doing to the greater New Smyrna Beach area.

nsbairportnoise.com

Comments are welcome. Please send your comments to:

Please send a link to FlaglerSOS.com to your friends and associates.

The Flagler County Commission supports flight training over our homes. The County Commission has placed the profit and business interests of flight schools above the rights of citizens to live in their homes and neighborhoods in peace, quiet and safety. In fact, the flight schools pay absolutely nothing to use the Airport. It’s all free, compliments of Flagler County taxpayers.

The Commissioners do not seem to care that the citizens elected them to protect citizens’ welfare and rights, and to make Flagler County a desirable place to live? The flight schools always come first, and the citizens seem to not matter at all.

George Hanns -- Chair

ghanns@flaglercounty.org

Bob Abbott -- Vice-Chair

babbott@flaglercounty.org

Milissa Holland -- Commissioner

mholland@flaglercounty.org

Alan Peterson -- Commissioner

apeterson@flaglercounty.org

Barbara Revels -- Commissioner

brevels@flaglercounty.org

Craig Coffey – County Administrator