Is this Sacramento neighborhood winning its battle against low-flying airplanes?

Four years ago, residents of several North Natomas neighborhoods awoke to a new and alarming sound, the roar of low-flying jets from nearby Sacramento International Airport directly over their homes.

Jet sounds are nothing new in Natomas. The airport has been there since 1967, long before most of the subdivisions were built, beginning in 2000. But this was different. Until 2015, federal aviation officials allowed jets a broad exit path when taking off from the airport, allowing them to gain elevation before curving on a variety of arcs over Sacramento rooftops.

In a streamlining effort four years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration began requiring jets to make a sharp turn immediately after takeoff along a narrow funnel that takes many of them at lower altitude directly over three neighborhoods west of Interstate 5: Westlake, Westshore and Sundance Lake.

In Sacramento, residents say the jets are so low and loud at times that they must stop conversations to wait for the jets to pass. “It’s deafening,” resident Sheila Snyder told The Sacramento Bee last year in a story highlighting the issue. “It’s ridiculous. We can see bird flocks flying higher than they are.”

Their complaints at first gained little traction. Now, in an email to The Bee and a January letter to airport officials, FAA officials say they have begun a review of the new takeoff routes, with the possibility of changes.

“The FAA is sensitive to aircraft overflight issues,” the agency’s regional administrator Raquel Girvin wrote to airport officials. “The FAA will review ... proposed procedure amendments.”

An FAA spokesman, speaking to The Bee this week, emphasized that the federal agency has not committed to any changes.

The federal decision appears to have come in response to written requests to the FAA from Sacramento County Airport executive Cindy Nichol and the city of Sacramento.

Nichol, in a letter, asked federal officials to listen to residents’ concerns and to consider allowing jets to fly farther south over farmland, gaining more elevation before banking over Natomas and Sacramento’s core.

The city of Sacramento, as well, stepped in on behalf of city residents last month. A city-hired law firm with expertise on aviation issues, Leech Tishman Fuscaldo & Lampl, sent a letter to the FAA saying the city wants to provide input on the decision-making process for new departure routes.

“The city hopes that the FAA will either include dispersal headings or lateral track variations that address the noise issues experienced by the residents of Natomas and make use of the vacant land to the west and south of Natomas until aircraft reach a higher altitude,” the attorneys wrote.

The law firm noted safety fears as well: “A second concern of the city is that the NextGen procedures have increased the risk of bird strikes over populated areas,” the firm wrote to the FAA. “The longer an aircraft flies at a lower altitude, the higher the risk that a bird strike would have catastrophic consequences.”

NextGen, short for Next Generation Transportation System, is a national overhaul of flight paths by the FAA. It has been controversial in some cities where the new routes have focused new jet activity over neighborhoods.

North Natomas resident Ellery Kuhn, a spokesman for some residents, said this week his group has not seen the letters, but is hopeful the FAA is taking the requests seriously.

“It sounds positive,” he said. “The people in the community are grateful that (city officials) have moved in the direction of having legal assistance in this matter. We have made our attempt to get the FAA involved and that wasn’t successful. Now, it has reached another level and that sounds good.”

A Sacramento Bee reporter spent time last year in the neighborhood near Del Paso Road west of Interstate 5 last year to observe the jets and talk with residents. During that time, jets at times flew overhead in as little as one-minute intervals. On a Wednesday morning just after 6 a.m., 20 jets flew over in a one-hour period. Some jet engines had high-pitched whines, others a rumbling sound that echoed off facades, and still others sounded smoother and less bothersome.

Even if the FAA alters its takeoff routes, noise issues and complaints are likely to continue as more flights daily take off from the growing airport and as more housing pops up in the area. Both the city and the county have ambitious residential and business growth plans near the airport.

Groundwork has begun on a community called Northlake at the outer edge of the city of Sacramento that would add more than 2,700 homes. They site, a few miles east of the airport — designated in city documents as Greenbriar — is planned for the northwest quadrant of the I-5 junction with Highway 99.

And, last year, the county Board of Supervisors gave developers the OK to start planning a 10,000-home series of subdivisions on farmland southeast of the airport, in an area once called the Boot, and now referred to as the Upper Westside project area.

This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 9:41 AM.