Virginia Gardens to MIA: Cool your noisy jets
The Village of Virginia Gardens wants Miami International Airport to cool its jets.
“We understand that we live next to the airport, but there are certain times that they cannot conduct run-ups,” said longtime Virginia Gardens Mayor Spencer Deno IV. “I actually heard an illegal run-up going on last week during the night. It woke me up.”
A run-up is aviation-speak for a process that includes revving jet engines, which often occurs before takeoff or during testing while the plane is stationary. Deno said locals have lodged complaints about them. Virginia Gardens, a working-class village that hugs Northwest 36th Street, north of the airport, is about one-third of a square mile and has a population of about 2,500.
“In the last month or so, we have had 11 p.m. to midnight run-ups,” said Donald Howard, a Virginia Gardens resident who sits on the airport’s Noise Abatement Advisory Board. “They know they are not supposed to do that.”
An investigation is underway and violators risk fines, Howard said. Those caught violating the noise ordinance face of first-time fines of $250 and subsequent fines of up to $500.
The county code that applies to the airport shows engine run-ups are prohibited on weekdays from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends from 11 p.m. to 10 a.m., unless an exemption has been granted. Exemptions require at least one hour’s notice.
“All aircraft engine run-ups during the prohibition period, under exemptions granted by the department, shall be limited to a maximum period of fifteen minutes, of which the run-up at maximum engine power shall be limited to no more than one minute,” states the code.
County officials installed remote monitoring stations that recorded sound about MIA, including one at the Virginia Gardens soccer field. These devices have since been removed.
“Permanent noise monitors were removed due to their age, 20 years old, and because these noise monitors had already served their purpose, which was to compare the aircraft arrival and departure noise to the FAA noise contours for MIA that are created every few years,” said Norman Hegedus, Miami-Dade’s airside operations’ manager.
Jet run-ups can exceed the FAA’s “significant” threshold of 65 decibels, which often rattles neighbors from their slumber.
“A recently released FAA report for a study called the ‘National Exposure Survey’ indicates that many more people are highly annoyed for DNL values much less than 65 decibels,” said Dr. Cindy Christiansen, a statistician at Boston University.
However, this metric may be flawed, she points out.
“One reason is that is does not represent the number of noise events that many people are now experiencing,” Christiansen said. “Although the noise events for those further from the airport are not as loud as they are for people close to or abutting the airport, the frequency of flyovers, often every two minutes, seems to be what bothers people five or more miles from the airport.”
The county built a noise-reduction wall along Northwest 36th Street in 1996 to quell complaints about jet run-ups and soot wafting onto cars and roofs. Soon after, the wall had its decorative red, yellow and green dots reconfigured as village locals heading south on Northwest 66th Avenue mistook them for traffic signals.
Noise complaints from Virginia Gardens and neighboring Miami Springs are uncommon, according to minutes from past noise- abatement board meetings. During 2020, there were six complaints from Virginia Gardens and three from neighboring Miami Springs, according to a public records request.
However, some outside the River Cities area often reach out to the airport, including a Miami Beach resident who, last year, filed “over 1,000 complaints.”
As MIA traffic picks up, more noise complaints may be forthcoming. Last month, the Herald reported that a group of cities in northeast Miami-Dade County is challenging the FAA in federal court over flight paths above their neighborhoods.
Under the county’s plan, about 65% of flight departures from MIA that previously spread out on parallel paths from Miami Beach to Miami Shores would be diverted to a slender corridor that crosses North Bay Village and moves north over Biscayne Park, North Miami Beach, North Miami and Miami Gardens.