FAA officials spent 3 1/2 hours listening to residents and elected officials rip into the way planes now fly over a host of communities, at a Milton meeting on Thursday that they agreed to attend only after US Rep. Stephen Lynch threatened to cut the agency's budget for community outreach by $25 million.
The meeting brought out several hundred people from Belmont to Hull, to complain that a new GPS-based flight-path system may be great for airline profits and schedules, but means unlucky residents are now subjected to endless waves of planes, often starting at 5 a.m., for days on end, because of the way it slots planes into very narrow air corridors. Residents also said planes are flying lower than they used to, further contributing to the noise. Read more.