Natural Quiet (Back to Landscapes Program Index)

Helicopter over Grand Canyon © GCT Archive

Since its inception in 1986, Grand Canyon Trust has worked to protect the solitude and stunning quiet afforded visitors to Grand Canyon National Park. But over time, a growing number of air tours has eroded the park's serenity and replaced it with the sounds of throbbing helicopter rotors and airplane engines.

The Trust was instrumental in securing passage of the 1987 National Parks Overflights Act, which sought to restore natural quiet to Grand Canyon by placing curbs on the expanding air tour industry. Yet, not ten years after this important legislation was passed, air tours over the park had increased by more than 100 percent!

Natural quiet in the park has remained elusive. In 1997 the Trust, therefore, filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration for failing to properly implement the 1987 law.

In June 1998, the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia upheld the government's effort to substantially restore natural quiet at the Grand Canyon. The air tour industry had challenged the government's efforts as being too stringent. The appeals court rejected all of the air tour industry arguments. The Grand Canyon Trust argued that the government had done too little, too late. The Grand Canyon Trust asked the court to order the immediate restoration of natural quiet, which would meet the letter, and the spirit, of the 1987 National Parks Overflights Act. The court agreed that the Federal Aviation Administration was "slow and faltering" and "tardy" but not unreasonable. The court has left the door open for the Trust to return in a few years if the FAA continues to drag its feet. It also admonished it would take the FAA "at its word" in promising to timely complete the job, and since 2001 has required status reports every 60 days.

Air tour industry noise ignores federal law mandating natural quiet within Grand Canyon National Park. Photo by the National Park Service.

The FAA has not met the timeline issued in President Clinton's 1996 Earth Day speech. During this outdoor address on the state of our national parks (part of which was drowned out by a low-flying aircraft), the President directed the FAA to complete a plan within five years that would meet the National Park Service's goal of substantial restoration of natural quiet. Substantial restoration has been defined by the NPS as 50 percent of the park being quiet, 75 -100 percent of the time. The Grand Canyon Trust has long maintained and argued that this standard is far too weak and needs to be strengthened. Even with the bar set way too low, the most recent set of rules released by the FAA showed that the 50 percent target was far from being met, especially during peak season.

In May of 2000 the Grand Canyon Trust and a coalition of environmental organizations initiated a new lawsuit against the FAA (Grand Canyon II), regarding the FAA's most recent final rule concerning Grand Canyon overflights. In this rule the FAA chose to average noise levels for all 365 days of the year even though most tour flying occurs during the busy summer months.

On April 18, 2001 the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided that two new air routes over the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas would take effect immediately after a judge denied efforts by the U.S. Air Tour Association to block them. The Court decided that the two pathways designed by the FAA to restore quiet to the park would not jeopardize safety. One route shortens the path in the southwest region of the park above the Sanup Plateau to avoid flying over the Hualapai Reservation. Another eliminates a route over National Canyon and the Havasupai Reservation.

On August 16, 2002, at the Overflight Act's 15th anniversary, the Court issued a strong ruling in favor of the Grand Canyon Trust. The Court's unanimous decision represented a significant victory for those who want to see natural quiet restored to the Grand Canyon, although, as the Grand Canyon Trust argued, and the Court's opinion confirmed, the government was not even close to achieving the Overflight Act mandate. Below is a brief summary of the Court's decision and the Trust's view about its implications for future agency action, which must be completed by early 2008.

Judge Merrick Garland, who also wrote the 1998 opinion in Grand Canyon I, authored the opinion for the Court. The Court agreed with the Trust on both of our arguments and rejected all of the arguments of the U.S. Air Tour Association (USATA).

	Can you still hear my song? Canyon Wren © by Christa Sadler/GCT

First, the Court held that the FAA may not use an "average day" standard for measuring noise in the Park but must instead use the Park Service's "any given day" interpretation. The Court went on to say it was skeptical that the FAA's averaging method was a reasonable application of the Overflights Act, suggesting that it would be difficult for the Park Service to reverse course and adopt that interpretation in the future. Judge Garland wrote: "for the typical visitor, who visits the Grand Canyon for just a few days during the peak summer season, the fact that the park is quiet 'on average' is cold comfort." On remand (sent back to the FAA for further action) the FAA had to accept the Park Service's natural quiet definition.

Second, the panel said that the FAA had not adequately explained its decision to exclude noise generated by non-tour aircraft from its noise estimates. The Court pointed to evidence in the 1994 NPS Report to Congress showing that the amount of time non-tour noise is audible is significant in many areas of the Park. On remand, the FAA was told to either include non-tour aircraft noise in its model or provide more persuasive evidence that such noise does not have a significant impact on noise levels in the Canyon. Recently released, NPS data instead proves that the noise is steadily increasing, is significant, and is much worse than a decade back.

The Court also rejected all of the arguments raised by the USATA. The Court upheld the government's decisions to apply the more sensitive "detectability" standard in the backcountry and to impose flight caps before finalizing a quiet technology rule. The Court also ruled that the government took adequate account of the economic impact on tour operators and on the disabled and elderly; and rejected the USATA's argument that the FAA's different treatment of flights to and from the Hualapai Indian Reservation constituted racial discrimination against air tour operators.

The FAA and the NPS consequently will need to go much further than they have to date to reach the required restoration of natural quiet in 50 percent of the Park. The Court did not prescribe how the government must reach the goal.

On October 3, 2002 Senator John McCain, a sponsor of the 1987 Overflights Act, held an oversight hearing on the FAA's progress in implementing this legislation. Senator McCain opened the hearing by stating his frustration that the work remains unfinished: "I frankly don't care who is responsible. What I care about is that we haven't reached our goal 15 years after it was established as law. What I want to know is when and how we will reach final resolution."

Tom Robinson, the Grand Canyon Trust's former Director of Government Affairs and Grand Canyon programs, presented testimony at the hearing. He told the oversight panel chaired by Senator McCain: "we shouldn't have to rely on litigation to move this process forward."

In September of 2003, Senator McCain once again assumed his role as guardian of Grand Canyon's natural quiet. As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, he refused to accept section 409 of H.R. 2115, the FAA Reauthorization bill, which would, in the short term, effectively have ended curfews for air tours flying in the Zuni and Dragon corridors over the Grand Canyon National Park. The amendment would have prohibited any NPS curfew regulation from restricting air tours in those corridors for more than one hour after sunrise, or more than one hour before sunset. If this amendment had passed in the final bill, visitors walking and boating in the Grand Canyon would lose many hours each day during which they could most fully experience the park's quiet majesty. This amendment would also have impeded the Park Service's progress towards the mandate of "substantial restoration of natural quiet."

Future rule making needs to significantly expand the inadequate curfews, particularly during the non-summer. Sunset is the most cherished time in the Grand Canyon, for good reason, and yet, for most of the fall and winter, the no-fly sunset curfew lasts less than an hour and as little as 15 minutes prior to sunset. Another rule making improvement would address the fact that one-third of the park has been arbitrarily given a weaker standard for the purposes of measuring modeling noise. This makes sense for certain developed portions of the South Rim but not for the entire Sanup Plateau and Marble Canyon. These wild and sensitive areas should receive the highest level of noise protection.

In June of 2003, the Grand Canyon Trust commented on the FAA's Draft Rule on Quiet Technology. In the comments, the Grand Canyon Trust stated that while the quiet technology rule could eventually be part of a larger plan, "quiet technology" was far too late, and wouldn't do it alone. "Quiet Technology" cannot be a foil for noise, lots of it!

The Trust requested in those comments (1) an immediate conversion to the quietest aircraft, and (2) a cap on the number of tour operations well below the 1987 levels.  None of this was done.

Another outcome of the October 3, 2002 oversight hearing, adopted within H.R. 2115, as ultimately passed, (and in lieu of the ill-advised curfew shortening), was the substitute amendment on the part of Senator McCain and others that engaged the services of the U.S. Center for Environmental Conflict Resolution, in Tucson, Arizona, to appoint a “third-party neutral” to assess the chances of success of a structured, alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) process.  The idea would be to belatedly come up with key, consensual elements of the never-produced comprehensive plan required by 2002, by President Clinton, which would phase in substantial restoration of natural quiet by 2008.

After extended preliminaries, the FAA and the NPS, along with the chosen mediator (Lucy Moore Associates, of Santa Fe, New Mexico), convened a designated stakeholder committee within the ADR framework.  It is called the Grand Canyon Working Group. Much preliminary, overview material has thereby been discussed, and posted at http://overflights.faa.gov, (see particularly the sub-link, “Related Documents.”)

The agencies are committed to draft a proposed Final Rule by the end of 2006, explaining how the substantial restoration of natural quiet would be achieved.  The Rule would become effective by April 22, 2008, the original target date of the Clinton directive.

The Grand Canyon Trust is determined by 2008 to bring back the sense of magic, awe, and natural quiet that early visitors experienced and so eloquently wrote about before the introduction of noisy air tours over the Grand Canyon.

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† The Grand Canyon Trust ultimately supports noise emission standards ONLY if they apply to ALL commercial tour aircraft at the Grand Canyon. We join with the others in opposing duplicate routes connecting the same two points (one incentive route and one non-incentive route.) This would only INCREASE noise by spreading it over a wider area. As other observers have commented, this would be counter-productive to both Rule and the Overflights Act. To have any positive effect, the standards must be mandatory, not voluntary. Noise emission standards should be a prerequisite for the privilege and expected consideration given for flying in the Grand Canyon SFRA. No other "incentive" is necessary (be it "preferred routes", "subsidies", "curfew elimination, shortening, or exemptions", "rollback in overflight fees", "waiving park admission fees for passengers", or "government loans."