FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Paula Dinerstein (202) 265-6391 pdinerstein@peer.org
Jeff Ruch (510) 213-7028 jruch@peer.org
Court Orders Curbs on Air Tours Over SF National Parks
FAA and NPS Embrace of Current Air Traffic Levels Ruled Inadequate
Washington, DC — The skies above national parks in the San Francisco Bay Area should become much quieter under a federal court ruling issued today in a lawsuit brought by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit threw out the environmental impact analysis of the plan adopted last year by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Park Service (NPS) to regulate tourist overflights across Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Point Reyes National Seashore, Muir Woods National Monument, and San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.
The Court faulted the agencies’ decision to forego the required environmental review or examination of alternatives before setting allowable tourist air traffic levels. The Court order directs the agencies to undertake a thorough assessment of noise, wildlife disturbance, and other adverse impacts and not to assume that pre-existing flight numbers were the “status quo”.
Plans to mitigate the adverse impacts of noisy tourist overflights were mandated by the National Park Air Tours Management Act of 2000. However, since that law required the two agencies with disparate missions to agree on any plan, that resulted in an impasse for nearly twenty years with no air tour management plan being adopted.
In 2020, PEER won a court order requiring the NPS and FAA to adopt plans managing the more than 47,000 annual flights across 24 national parks within two years. While there have been some delays, that process is now largely complete. While most plans are settled, there is ongoing litigation on the decision to completely ban tourist overflights across Mt. Rushmore and Badlands National Parks, which PEER supports, following eco-reviews as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
However, for the four San Francisco area parks, the two agencies decided against doing any NEPA environmental impact analysis and instead merely accepted the average number of flights over the prior three years as its plan with only minor mitigation of adverse impacts.
“First, we had to sue the FAA and Park Service to get them to finally complete plans, but it has taken another lawsuit to get the agencies to do it right,” commented PEER General Counsel Paula Dinerstein. “The agencies will finally have to take the hard look at the noise and other adverse impacts they have been avoiding for years.”
The next steps are somewhat unclear, as the Court vacated the current plan, but the Court majority invited the agencies and PEER to seek a stay. This means that the status of continuing overflights during the environmental impact analysis process will themselves remain up in the air.
The Court’s 2-1 majority also used the case as a vehicle to repudiate the validity of fundamental Council on Environmental Quality regulations that have been used for five decades to implement federal environmental review processes. That is a separate question in which PEER anticipates defending those regulations if necessary. PEER supports the strong dissenting opinion of Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan on that question.
“We urge the NPS and FAA to begin the required environmental reviews immediately,” added Dinerstein, noting that following full NEPA review tourist overflights have been sharply reduced or even eliminated in some parks. “Protection of park resources and the visitor experience should be the guides going forward, not bureaucratic convenience.”
PEER’s co-plaintiffs in the action are the Marin Audubon Society, the Watershed Alliance of Marin, and Laura Chariton.
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Look at unfolding curbs on national park overflights
See continuing fight in skies over Mt. Rushmore and Badlands
