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HomeMy WebLinkAboutFlying Cloud Airport Advisory Commission - 07/08/2010 APPROVED MINUTES FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION THURSDAY,JULY 8, 2010 4:30 P.M. AVIATION CENTER 10100 FLYING CLOUD DRIVE EDEN PRAIRIE, MN 55347 COMMISSION MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Rick King; Vice-Chair Jeff Larsen; Commissioners: Judy Gentry (arrived at 4:32 p.m.), Greg McKewan, Mark Michelson, Jeff Nawrocki and Kurt Schendel COMMISSION MEMBERS ABSENT: None PENDING STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE: Neeraj Ajgaonkar VISITORS: Jennifer Lewis, MAC; Dana Swanson, MAC STAFF: Scott Kipp, Senior Planner; Jan Curielli, City Recorder I. CALL TO ORDER/ROLL CALL Chair King called the meeting to order at 4:30 p.m. II. APPROVAL OF AGENDA Larsen said Chair King mentioned at the last meeting he might have some information on the JAZB at this meeting. King said he will address that later. MOTION: Larsen moved, seconded by Michelson, to approve the agenda as published. Motion carried 6-0. III. WELCOME NEW STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE A. NEERAJ AJGAONKAR King said the new student representative, Neeraj Ajgaonkar, attended the 1:00 p.m. commission meeting and took the tour of the MAC facility, the airport premises, Elliott Aviation and InFlight. He was unable to stay for the regular business meeting. IV. PUBLIC COMMENT V. APPROVAL OF MINUTES A. COMMISSION MEETING HELD THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2010 FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 2 King said the meeting time in Item VII., sentence three, paragraph one, should be 4:30 p.m., not 4:00 p.m. Also in Item VII he said the words "central radio facility" should be changed to"Air Route Traffic Control Center." McKewan asked that the word"signing" in Item V.A., sentence two, paragraph two, be changed to "signage." MOTION: Michelson moved, seconded by Larsen, to approve the May 13, 2010, minutes as amended. Motion carried 6-0. VI. GUEST SPEAKERS VII. DISCUSSION ITEMS A. AIRPORT SECURITY REPORT AND COUNCIL PRESENTATION Kipp said he has incorporated everyone's comments and changes into the document. He had a brief discussion with Mr. Larsen, and they believe the second item under Flying Cloud Airport Advisory Commission Findings is a strong finding. It states the experts agree this is a safe airport and it has gone beyond what a typical airport would do. Larsen said the chair asked each of the responding agencies whether there was anything else that could or should be done, and no one really had any other suggestions. He thought we would want to highlight that for the City Council. King said at this point the report is scheduled to go to the City Council meeting on July 20 so we would want to get final approval of the report from the commission today. The commission will make a presentation and review the report with the Council. Gentry asked for the following changes: Page 2, Accomplishments list, fourth bullet, change"Guide" to "Guides"; page 3, sentence 1,paragraph 3, delete the words "called in"; page 4, sentence 2,paragraph 2, change to"fire suppression systems"; page 4, sentence 2,paragraph 3, change to"...coordinating these events." Larsen asked for two changes on page 5, paragraph 2. Sentence 2 should be changed to: "These people are familiar with the airport and know when something doesn't look right." Sentence 4 should be changed to: "This program is done in partnership with TSA." McKewan questioned page 5, finding 3, and asked if it is correct that MAC has a great working relationship with the City Police and Fire or is it more of a cooperative one. King thought the term "great" was what we heard from the people involved. Nawrocki said the changing it to"cooperative" would be toning it down. FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 3 King said those revisions will be included in the final report that goes to the Council on July 20. Kipp asked who will present at the Council meeting. Larsen said he will present the report as Chair King will not be available that date. MOTION: King moved, seconded by Gentry, to approve the Review of Security at Flying Cloud Airport report as prepared and amended. Motion carried 7-0. B. DISCUSS AND RECOMMEND TO CITY COUNCIL POLICY FOR NOISE LETTERS King said we as a group have said bombarding people with letters doesn't work, and we would like to find a way to make them count when we send them. He noted this was brought up at the City Council workshop, and the Council wanted some more work done on this. Because the City Council probably will not discuss this before the election this year,he suggested the commission work on something to present to the Council sometime between November and December. He thought we should be as detailed as we can as to what we think would be the best option. We discussed sending one letter to an operator per report period rather than 30 or 40 letters in some cases. Swanson reviewed the statistics on the operator letters with a slide that showed about 57% of the repeat letters between January and June went to only three operators. King asked if those operators have been well informed about the policy. Swanson said they have. King noted when they get that many letters we worry about a negative reaction. Lewis said she takes phone calls from the letter recipients, and the first time they call they are concerned and talk about procedures. Those who have received a letter in the past call only if they feel the letter was uncalled for. They feel they have all the information they need and there is nothing more they can do to avoid a complaint. King said we would have to negotiate an amendment to the 2002 agreement in order to change the procedure, and that becomes a difficult message for the public from the City Council's perspective. He said it may be worth pushing for that when you have people who are antagonized by the volume of letters they receive. He also thought it is a lot of busy work for MAC. The question is how strongly we feel about doing an amendment to the agreement. Gentry asked if both the pilot and the company he works for receive a letter. Lewis said the owner of the aircraft gets the letter and, in some cases, the owner is not the operator. The owner may choose to pass the letter on to the pilot. Nawrocki noted it is almost impossible for us to determine who the pilot was. The commission then discussed how we might go about getting to the customers so they know about the restrictions in the agreement. FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 4 McKewan thought there will have to be some trade-off if we want to get this changed, perhaps by changing the volunteer curfew hours by a half hour. King said we talked about whether MAC could commit to some extra landscaping. Michelson said he has had conversations with people about this, and he is on the side of fewer letters meaning more than many letters. He said he was taken aback by those who do not want to go away from the one infraction, one letter procedures. He said we haven't discussed the possibility that the infractions may be scalable. Nawrocki thought we might do the letters monthly and list in the letter how many times the discrepancy occurred. That would make them aware on a monthly basis of the dates and times of violations. King thought we might be able to do that without an amendment to the agreement. He said when he originally talked to Mr. Leqve about this the trade-off was going to be multilateration,but their time window for multilateration was much sooner than we could get the letter worked out. Gentry asked if the trade-off isn't that it is much less work to send out only one letter. Larsen said MAC has never come to us and requested that they not send out the letters,rather it is Commission concern that is causing the issue. Gentry said, as a resident, she would be okay with one letter that listed a number of complaints rather than an equivalent number of letters. Larsen said he reviewed the wording in the section of the agreement regarding the letter to be sent out by MAC, and it doesn't say when the letter has to be sent. He thought a consolidated statement in which every violation is listed would be in compliance with the agreement. Michelson asked if operators respond with a detailed reason for the infraction. Lewis said most of the letters we send out do not get a response, and we get more phone responses than letters. Generally the first time they receive a letter they will call and ask for more information about noise abatement. Nawrocki noted some operators will let us know about the infraction before the flight takes place. Nawrocki said those flights would be considered pre-approved so they wouldn't get a letter. Michelson said the three big operators are probably receiving the most letters and it is more a question of educating the people that hire them. We could only educate customers with signage in the airport about the noise abatement policy to make sure those who hire the plane get the message. He said it is a question of how to get to the end user that is doing the hiring without interfering with the business operation. McKewan said he was not sure people would wait if they are delayed beyond regular hours. King said the Netjets itinerary lists information on curfew time. We have discussed asking the operators to put some text on the bottom of their itinerary FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 5 that has wording about the voluntary curfew. Michelson thought that is about all that could be done. King asked the commission members if they wanted to reopen the issue since that is the only part of the equation we haven't done something about. Nawrocki said he will check with Mr. Leqve about printing a message on the itineraries. King said the City Council has to deal with the people in the community who complain about the infractions. He said he would check with Rick Rosow and Tom Anderson to see if we could change to one letter per month with a summary of violations without having to amend the agreement. He and Mr. Kipp will pursue this and will push for it with Mr. Rosow because no one wants the letters to have a negative impact. Kipp said it might actually open up their eyes if they see a letter with a list of 20 or so violations with the departure times listed. Gentry asked Ms Lewis if they could prepare such a summary of violations. Lewis said she didn't see any immediate problem. They are working on an automated process and they could take the information and see how it would fit in. King said we will put this on the agenda for September and move forward if it is approved. Michelson said it is important to remember this is an initiative by the City because we think the letters are not doing any good after a certain point. We are making the proposal and taking it to MAC because we think the process now is counter-intuitive. Larsen thought the City Council has to be made aware this is not a request from MAC. C. SOUTH BUILDING AREA DEVELOPMENT Nawrocki said commission members saw the development in the south building area today during the tour. The area is still lacking utilities and that is the biggest challenge. The cost to run utilities to the spot is just under$2,000,000. There are people that are interested in the area but the big question is the utilities. They have a group that meets on a monthly basis about the development, and there is a big push from leadership to get this up and running. D. MULTILATERATION DEPLOYMENT STATUS Lewis said the multilateration system has been deployed. It is up and running on the website. There is a one-day delay in the data available but they are working on making it real time where the flight track data will be available with only a ten minute delay. Gentry asked what that will look like. Lewis said it looks like blips across the screen and is a snapshot of movement of air craft. Gentry asked if that is available on personal computers. Lewis said it is. FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 6 VIII. EDUCATIONAL ITEMS IX. FINAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN CITY AND MAC A. NOISE COMPLAINTS/STAGE 2 OPERATIONS REPORT (JANUARY- FEBRUARY) King said the transition to multilateration is the key to noise reporting. At the last meeting we discussed trying to correlate the resident's noise complaint and the aircraft that causes the complaint. He said he would like to start correlating the number of complaints received per flight so we can track the one flight that was the issue, not the ten complaints. Schendel said he agreed it is not the number of noise complaints that is important,rather it is the flight. He said early and late infractions deserve a letter but a lot of the complaints are not about early or late infractions. King said we will now know the flight causing the infraction and can correlate all the complaints to the flight, so we might just report on the number of flights that caused complaints. He said right now the lead item is the number of complaints filed,but the lead item in the future could be the operations that caused complaints. Michelson said we can explain how multilateration allowed us to get better data and that drove us to the change in the letter. Lewis said we have more accurate and timely data because of the MLAT data. The data is much more precise and we are able to see the track all the way to the runway so we are now able to associate the flight with Flying Cloud Airport. She said they are proposing to create an area of influence around each of the complaints recorded and the flight that operated within the area of complaint plus or minus five minutes. We could add a column regarding complaint correlation to the report. McKewan asked if it is possible to list what kind of aircraft caused the complaint. Lewis said they could add some aircraft information. Schendel asked how close that would come to aircraft identification. Lewis said we don't have all the flight data and would just list the type of aircraft. Michelson asked if using kilometers for the noise complaint area creates too big an area. Lewis said they look at all the flight tracks to see which flight came closest to the home where the time of operation was within three kilometers of the home and plus or minus five minutes of flight time. She said this is a consistent method of investigating complaints, and we chose three kilometers because that is the standard we already established. She said we plan to identify it in a map that will summarize the total number of operations and flight tracks. It will break down the correlated flight tracks and show how many caused one complaint or multiple complaints and how many caused more than one complaint at more than one location. Larsen asked if they will list calls from one individual who called every two FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 7 minutes. Lewis said they propose to summarize three categories of complaints: one complaint from multiple locations, multiple complaints from one or more locations and one complaint at one location. They also propose to break out night time operations, indicate if the complaint was correlated, and distinguish on the flight track map whether it was an arrival or departure and if it was a helicopter flight. King thought this is a good proposal and it would be good to get the aircraft type included. It will probably need to be tweaked,but we can look at it again when we have two months of data. Larsen said there is a lot more to the data than he thought we would get. Kipp noted it is more accurate information and will enable us to find out where the loud areas are. Gentry asked if this is the time to thank MAC for deploying the multilateration system. King thought we should do a letter at a certain point but he would like it to come from the City Council. He thought we should do the work on the single violation letter, get the data from the last two months, and make it a package before we suggest that to the City Council. Schendel said we need to have the experience for a couple of months to see the changes ourselves. McKewan said if the data is summarized monthly the operator may see a correlation between the pilot or the aircraft involved in the complaints and may be able to help us more. Lewis asked if the commission would want the area of influence reduced. The consensus was to leave it as is and see what that does with the data. King thanked Ms Lewis for her work. B. RESIDENTIAL NOISE TESTING PROGRAM UPDATE—JENNIFER LEWIS Lewis said we have been working on the residential noise testing program. She said Mr. Kipp sent out 51 letters to homeowners, and 27 homeowners responded that they were interested in participating. She said 21 of the homes were selected, and those homeowners were invited to a meeting to learn what would be involved. There were 15 homeowners who attended the meeting. The actual testing of the homes began on June 1 and as of June 30 we have tested 13 homes. Michelson asked how the testing was done. Lewis said we generate noise from a speaker and then measure the sound level on the outside and the inside of the home and determine the difference. Schendel asked what the goal is. Lewis said they want a 20 db or more difference between the inside and outside measurements. Kipp noted it takes about 1-1/2 hours to test a home. King asked if we will have all the data when we meet in September. Lewis said we will have completed the testing and the reports to the homeowners and will provide a summary of all the information at the meeting. FLYING CLOUD AIRPORT ADVISORY COMMISSION MINUTES July 8, 2010 Page 8 Gentry asked what would be done if the noise difference was less than 20 db. Lewis said we would try to identify why and mitigation would have to be provided. X. NOISE ABATEMENT/AIRCRAFT INCIDENTS XI. NEW BUSINESS Nawrocki said they are meeting tonight and again next Thursday to draft recommendations for hangar aesthetics. They will present the recommendations to the hangar owners to let them know our expectations for the next year. There will be informational meetings this month with a public meeting this fall. In January the airport managers will write letters about deficiencies in hangars for the ones that are in bad shape. He said we have done research with contractors and there is some significant money to be invested in the hangars. Nawrocki said they gave a tour to a group from Lodi, China. That community is looking at developing an airport similar to those in Rochester and St. Cloud in the next couple of years. Nawrocki said they did some training with City of Eden Prairie Fire Department personnel recently about airport security and aircraft accidents. XII. OTHER BUSINESS A. VARIOUS FYI ITEMS 1. Approved FCAAC Minutes of March 11, 2010 2. Memo to City Council on Recent Aircraft Accidents 3. Next Commission meeting— September 9, 2010 King said the Air Expo is next weekend. He said the commission will be doing a tour of the Farmington facility in September, and he suggested we pick a time and meet at City Hall to drive to Farmington. Nawrocki said they will have a van available. King asked commission members to call Mr. Kipp if they plan to drive to Farmington by themselves. Kipp noted the memo to the City Council on recent aircraft accidents. King said he thought we did what we were asked to do and it is a good report. We had a very small role in the investigation. XIII. ADJOURNMENT MOTION: Michelson moved, seconded by McKewan, to adjourn the meeting. Motion carried 7-0. Chair King adjourned the meeting at 6:25 p.m.