FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, March 3, 2025
Contact:
Peter Jenkins (202) 265-4189 pjenkins@peer.org
Jeff Ruch (510) 213-7028 jruch@peer.org
Court Puts Air Tours of SF National Parks on Tight Tether
FAA and Park Service Ordered to Impose Limits by 2026 after Eco-Review
Washington, DC — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Park Service (NPS) to develop new limits on tourist overflights across national parks in the San Francisco Bay Area, in litigation brought by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The court directed the agencies to develop the plan after conducting an environmental impact analysis over the next year.
The Court order affects fixed wing and helicopter tours over Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Point Reyes National Seashore, Muir Woods National Monument, and San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. The ruling followed an earlier Court ruling that the FAA and NPS had failed to do the required impact analysis before adopting a plan in 2023 which allowed overflights at previous levels.
The ruling caps long-running legal efforts by PEER to force the two agencies to finally implement the National Parks Air Tour Management Act of 2000, which requires the two agencies to jointly adopt overflight limits that “mitigate or prevent the significant adverse impacts, if any, of commercial air tour operations upon natural and cultural resources, visitor experiences, and tribal lands.”
For more than 20 years until PEER sued them, the FAA and NPS had not adopted a single park air tour management plan despite extensive complaints about noise, wildlife disturbances, and other adverse impacts from essentially unregulated air tour traffic across scores of national parks.
“We appreciate the Court holding the FAA and Park Service’s feet to the fire to make sure they finally assess the eco-impacts of this air traffic,” stated PEER Senior Counsel Peter Jenkins. “Now we will keep our eyes on them to ensure they do a good job.”
While the Court order found that the current plan was developed illegally, it allowed it to remain in effect for one year during which the two agencies will draft a new plan following a thorough review pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). To that end, the Court granted “a stay of issuance of the mandate” based on an agreement of all parties that it was better to keep the current management plan in place for the next year while the agencies do their impact analysis, rather than invalidating the plan immediately, which would have left the earlier unregulated system in place.
“The agencies’ failure to conduct any environmental assessment for the San Francisco Bay Area parks was both regrettable and inexplicable,” added Jenkins, noting that the FAA and NPS had done NEPA analyses for several other parks, pointing to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands as two examples. “In each park where the agencies did NEPA review, they sharply reduced or eliminated air traffic altogether.”
PEER’s co-plaintiffs in this suit include the Marin Audubon Society and Watershed Alliance of Marin.
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