New air traffic at the Wilmington Air Park has some Centerville residents concerned about the potential for some heavy late-night flyover noise in their community.
Resident David Lee, who lives in the Rockleigh Road area, told council that the same issue surfaced nearly 23 years ago, and he would like to see city officials convene a committee to make sure the flyover of flights coming from the air park does not include a large part of Centerville.
Wilmington Air Park, an integrated aviation and logistics business park located on 1,900 acres with nearly three million square feet of industrial, office and hangar space, has experience recent growth. It is run by the Clinton County Port Authority.
Lee hopes that any problems with noise can be dealt with before flight patterns are set.
“This is sort of a deja vu for me. I think I addressed the council about 23 years ago on the same issue – airplane noise,” Lee said. “One of the problems we had back in the 1990s is the planes coming out of Airborne, which is now the Wilmington Air Park.”
Centerville formed an airplane noise task force then to address trying to move a flight pattern coming out from the airport that flew over a portion of the community.
“We had about 28 of them (planes) - sometimes between 20 and 28 of them - flying over our community right here at approximately Nutt Road, some of them were probably flying over this building (Centerville Municipal Building, 100 West Spring Valley Road) because they could go three miles one way or the other,” Lee recounted.
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Mayor Brooks Compton said that it is “a good idea,” to find out answers to the questions Lee had posed regarding flight patterns and to open discussions with air park officials.
With Amazon headed to the air park, as well as other companies poised for growth, Lee said the idea of late-night flight noise isn’t a problem yet, but a potential one.
The issue is whether the air park can change the “305 radial flight pattern,” which runs by the city, and that was an issue 23 years ago.
“We tried to change that. We had the FAA in here, we had air traffic conrtol from Dayton and we had people from Airborne, and you know what we got? Absoulutely nowhere,” Lee said. “Change is going to happen at the local level.”
He said more than 900 residents signed petitions and sent them to lawmakers at the federal and state levels, as well as to the FAA and air traffic control in Dayton.
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“We didn’t complain too much about the daytime flights. We complained about the flights that were coming from this 305 radial between about 3:30 in the morning to six o’clock in the morning,” Lee explained.
City Manager Wayne Davis said he would speak to lawmakers and also Washington Twp. officials regarding the issue, adding that hush kits have allowed planes to fly quieter and there haven’t been established flight patterns yet.
He added that the airplanes also have changed under FAA regulations with newer technology and with 767 aircraft models being flown instead of DC 8 or DC 10 aircraft.
“I think we can ask those questions,” Davis said.
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