Dear Editor:
In your last issue, Tom Philipps raised the issue of helicopter noise. He wrote his letter at 6 a.m. after being awakened by helicopters. The editor’s title to his letter, “Hoboken, heliport capital of the five boroughs”, seemed extremely flippant, given that Mr. Philipps’s concern is, if anything, understated.
George Orwell, in his novel 1984, was obsessed with the use by a police state of two then very new technologies: television and helicopters. The former was used for continuous indoctrination, and both were used for continuous surveillance and intimidation.
In our time we have seen television fulfill Orwell’s expectations. Programming creates anxiety through the depiction of physical and emotional violence, inducing a state of heightened suggestibility which conditions us to buy whatever products and messages that are being sold. We are not only being sold commercial goods, however. We are also being sold the lie that our economy is strong and our lives are good. Meanwhile, we are being sold down the river. Our environment is going to hell, and we are losing our ability to have any kind of say in what happens to us or to our world. Our lives are reduced to institutional workdays with evenings and weekends reserved for “recreation”, including an average of four hours a day watching television. In front of the tube we can hypnotically absorb the fantasy lives of beautiful people, substituting them for our own. So that we will not be disturbed by reality, our environment is regulated with air conditioning and acoustically insulated from the outside world by two panes of glass.
I am exaggerating, you say. But how else can you explain the fact that almost nobody seems to be aware of the thousandfold increase in helicopter noise and incursion into Hoboken space which has occurred since early 1998?
Several hundred times a day helicopters fly near enough to Hoboken to create significant noise impact. “Touring helicopters” fly down our side of the Hudson River, frequently as often as one per minute, each taking several minutes to make the excursion from 34th Street Heliport past Hoboken to the Statue of Liberty.
Transportation helicopters taxi between Manhattan and New Jersey airports. And perhaps the most insidious are the “news ‘copters” which hover within Hoboken’s airspace, often directly over our heads, for periods ranging from several minutes to several hours, recording such significant events as the frequent traffic tie-ups at the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. Nobody considers this “news”, not even the networks themselves: for each hour of hovering, there may be five or 10 seconds of broadcast footage of a traffic jam, which is totally devoid of informational value.
What is the “impact” of this helicopter traffic? I won’t even go into the dangers of pollution and the risk of a helicopter crashing in a densely populated area. The main impact is that we are exposed to a level and quality of noise which literally interferes with the functioning of our brains. Any mental concentration is destroyed by the noise competing for our attention. Sleep is disturbed. The hours during which helicopters are active have steadily increased, so now they may be hovering above us as early as 5 a.m. and as late as 2 or 3 a.m. Thus, helicopter noise disrupts both sleeping and thinking and occupies almost all hours of the day and night.
Such mentally disruptive noise levels have the additional impact of conditioning us to be more accepting of further losses of our rights and environmental degradation. The logical extension of “news ‘copters”, which disrupt thousands of our minds for minutes or hours in exchange for a few seconds of vacuous air time, is police surveillance helicopters, which will keep us in line by intimidation and trauma conditioning. If we can allow our minds to be traumatized without any protest, can the Orwellian police state be far behind?
Since many suffer for the gain of a few, one would think that our government would intervene on our behalf. Not so. Only the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the power to regulate helicopter flights, and they have been actively hostile towards any public attempt to limit helicopter traffic.
Although Congress has directed the FAA to conduct a national study on the effects of nonmilitary helicopter noise on individuals and to develop recommendations for the reduction of these effects, the FAA has limited the scope of the study so that it fails to adequately assess the helicopter problem. However, the FAA is obliged to solicit public input, so you can participate in the study by informing them not only of your experiences with helicopter noise, but of any proposed solutions you might have. For example, the times of day, frequency, and duration of helicopter flyovers and your reaction to them (e.g. anxiety, anger, and disruption of your concentration and sleep) would be significant data for the study. It would also be possibly useful if several thousand recommended the following solution: ban all non-emergency helicopter flights from densely populated areas. Your comments must be mailed in triplicate to the FAA, Office of Chief Counsel, Attn: Rules Docket, Docket No. 30086, 800 Independence Ave. SW, Room 915H, Washington, DC, 20591 to arrive by Sept 24, 2000 to be considered.
I felt obliged to communicate this to the public, but I am frankly skeptical that this will have much influence on helicopter regulation. I am open to discussing other strategies with interested parties.
I do believe that unregulated invasion of our space by helicopters is a major assault on the very fabric of our lives and must be resisted. Otherwise we will soon lose the minimum conditions necessary to live.
Daniel Tumpson