DUUKE THREE process started

Newport Bluffs residents along the Back Bay will have to live with the current procedure for airplanes departing from John Wayne Airport until possibly 2011, Federal Aviation Administration officials said Monday.

Ian Gregor, FAA spokesman, said the administration’s data show that commercial jetliners taking off from JWA using DUUKE TWO are still flying slightly east, sometimes over Newport Bluffs homes, instead of down the center of the Back Bay as intended.

DUUKE THREE, which would move a way point — a location on a plane’s flight path it has to cross — that’s about two miles off the coast — hundreds of feet west — may not be implemented until 2011, Gregor said.

“The [DUUKE TWO] procedure does what we intended it to do,” Gregor said. “It falls within the parameters of the flight tracks. It’s a matter of fine tuning it. The changes we’re making are very, very small ... we just want to thread the needle here.”

About 50 of the airport’s departing flights use the procedure, which is supposed to give the flights more consistency in takeoff paths and keep them centered down the bay through satellite navigation.

The majority of the airport’s flights use traditional land-based navigation for takeoffs and fly over the center of the Back Bay with much more consistency, the data show.

If the FAA has been trying to thread the needle, to this point they’ve had a hard time getting close to the eye, critics say.

In September the FAA introduced DUUKE ONE, which affects all flights out of JWA headed east of Las Vegas. A minor charting error in the design had planes flying too far east as they left the airport. DUUKE TWO was introduced April 8 with the error removed.

But DUUKE TWO hasn’t met residents’ or the FAA’s satisfaction, so they’re adjusting it again. This time, the fix will take more approval and testing before it can be implemented on the flight charts, Gregor said.

That has many residents frustrated.

“The fact that residents on the east side of the bay will have to put up with continual assaults on their health, safety and well-being for another eight months while the FAA tries to get it right is disturbing evidence of the agency’s complete disregard for the impact of its actions on the communities it is supposed to serve,” said Susan Menning, a Newport Bluffs resident.

“How disappointing,” resident Linda West said in an e-mail to the Daily Pilot. “It appears to me that The Bluffs are certainly not important.”

Federal officials said the DUUKE procedures are meant to provide flight track consistency, not noise abatement. Officials maintain noise levels have not changed since the procedures were introduced.

Newport Bluffs Homeowners Assn. board member Don Passaglia said it might not be any louder under the new procedures, but the noise is heard far more frequently in the neighborhood.