Barbara Deckert has a new weapon in the war against airplane noise — and she’s not afraid to use it.
Every time a plane flies over her suburban Maryland home, rattling her windows and setting her teeth on edge, she presses a small white button and feels a tiny sense of triumph.
That’s because with one click, Deckert has done what could have taken her hours to do a few months ago — she’s filed a noise complaint with officials at the Maryland Aviation Administration.
Thanks to the ingenuity of a software engineer from Southern California, Deckert and hundreds of others with similar beefs now have an easy way to register their annoyance with the jets that fly over their homes, the Airnoise button.
“It’s a fabulous tool,” Deckert said. “Clicking that button is really psychologically satisfying.”
Officials at airports from Seattle to Baltimore said Airnoise has led to a dramatic spike in complaints. At Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, officials are almost certain Airnoise is the reason complaints surged to 17,228 in August from just 2,692 the previous month. In San Diego, more than 90 percent of the complaints came through third-party apps like Airnoise.
Airnoise is the brainchild of California resident Chris McCann, who repurposed the same plastic Dash Button that Amazon customers use to order toilet paper and detergent.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
One click of the red-and-white button and McCann’s software program sends a detailed complaint directly to the agency in charge.
“Airport authorities don’t make it easy to file noise complaints, but we do,” McCann’s site boasts. “With the click of a button, instantly locate loud, bothersome flights, automatically file a complaint and get back to things that matter to you.”
McCann launched Airnoise in 2017 to help fellow residents in their fight about noise from flights at San Diego International Airport, near his home in La Jolla. Word quickly spread and soon other communities’ residents, who are engaged in similar skirmishes, wanted the buttons.
So far, he’s sent out more than 700 of the clickers. As of mid-December, users had filed nearly 1.1 million noise complaints at 29 U.S. airports.
“People want to do something about the problem, but they have lives to live, kids to raise and they don’t want to spend an hour or two filing noise complaints,” said McCann, who is also a former Air Force test pilot. “[Airnoise] is a low-impact way for people to do and say something about the issue.”
Scott Stevson, who works with the Quiet Skies Coalition group near Seattle, said the two dozen buttons the group recently ordered, were quickly snapped up.
Even before the arrival of Airnoise, airports had been dealing with a surge in complaints linked to the Federal Aviation Administration’s effort to modernize the air traffic system, known as NextGen.
The multibillion-dollar program is changing the way air traffic is managed, moving it from radar to satellite navigation. Proponents say it makes the air traffic system more efficient because it allows planes to fly more direct routes to their destinations.
But the shift has angered residents, who live in neighborhoods that are below the new flight paths. Residents in northwest Washington sued the FAA over the changes, but lost in court. A suit filed by the state of Maryland is pending.
McCann was one of those affected. He lived in La Jolla for more than a decade and, other than the occasional stray plane, had not had problems with noise. But that began to change in fall 2016.
