Homeowners Ask Pilots to Change Helicopter Routes

Homeowners who have fought Van Nuys airport noise for years through political protests and state and local zoning hearings took a new tack Tuesday--they simply asked some pilots to go away.

It doesn’t appear that is going to work either.

A coalition of homeowner groups wrote to helicopter operators, asking them not to use a designated helicopter route that passes over neighborhoods south of the airport. However, not only did some pilots say they would have to ignore the request, but the effort annoyed representatives of homeowners east of the airport, who protested that rerouted choppers would pass over their homes instead.

An alliance of 13 groups representing homeowners along the Ventura Freeway, from the Cahuenga Pass to Woodland Hills, sent letters to more than 60 helicopter operators at the airport asking them to avoid southerly arrivals and departures and instead fly over mostly commercial and industrial areas east of the airport.

But the request was snubbed by helicopter pilots and a representative of homeowners elsewhere.

“It looks like a bunch of elitists south of the freeway who are trying to push everything undesirable to the central Valley,” said Don Schultz, president of Van Nuys Homeowners Assn. and a member of the airport’s citizens advisory panel.

Schultz said the southerly helicopter route that the pilots were asked to avoid is designed to mask helicopter noise with the noise of freeway traffic.

Nigel Turner, president of HeliLA, the state’s largest helicopter sightseeing firm, which flies out of Van Nuys, said helicopter pilots have tried to be sensitive to neighborhood concerns. But, he said, “we’ve got to look at the big picture at Van Nuys, not just at one community. This is totally trying to put noise over to one community.”

Homeowner leaders who support the request say the plan is to send helicopters over industrial and commercial areas, not residential neighborhoods.

“It’s going to put them on routes that disturb the fewest people,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

The letters sent Tuesday included a map that describes the “noise sensitive” neighborhoods as the areas bordered by Woodman Avenue on the east, Balboa Boulevard on the west, the Sepulveda Basin on the north and the Santa Monica Mountains on the south.