Advocacy group Plane Sense 4 Long Island teams up with Airnoise

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The level of jet noise from Kennedy and LaGuardia airports has increased in recent years, according to the advocacy group Plane Sense 4 Long Island.
“We’ve always had planes — nobody’s disputing that,” said Jana Goldenberg, co-chairwoman of the organization. “But not to this extent. And that’s why we need to get the word out about Airnoise.”
Airnoise — founded by software engineer and former Air Force test pilot Chris McCann — is a handheld device that is activated by pressing what looks like a clicker. The button automatically locates the nearest aircraft, and registers a complaint with the appropriate airport.
“It’s a godsend,” said Goldenberg, who recently moved from Roslyn to Jericho to escape jet noise.
She said that she and Plane Sense Co-chairwoman Elaine Miller, of Malverne, have tried to find easier ways to file noise complaints than going through the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s website, where residents have to fill out a form or call a jet noise hotline. With Airnoise, residents can file complaints with the push of a button.

“Nobody wants to fill out forms and file complaints all day long,” Goldenberg said. “We have a life, too.”
In addition, Airnoise tallies every individual complaint, whereas the Port Authority gathers complaints per household. Since McCann’s first customer in March 2017, Airnoise has logged over 339,000 complaints.
McCann, who lives in San Diego, said that he started to notice jet noise problems in 2016. “I started looking into the situation and realized what was happening in terms of the [Federal Aviation Administration] and NextGen, and I realized that people were unhappy with the additional noise that they were getting,” he said.
He was inspired to create the Airnoise button after he heard about software designer Nathan Pryor’s Amazon’s Dash button hack, which enabled him to make a $5 donation to the American Civil Liberties every time President Trump angered him.
“I thought that was pure genius, so I used that as the nucleus of my idea,” McCann said. “What this guy did fundamentally fit what I was trying to do: use the simplest, fastest mechanism to trigger something to happen on a website.”
Once McCann started collaborating with groups across the country, such as Plane Sense 4 Long Island, he realized that jet noise was an issue common to many communities.
“I never thought this issue would get entire groups of people together, but it’s been a pleasure,” he said. “With that, my focus kind of shifted a little bit to make the system more generic and more flexible.”
Plane Sense came across Airnoise almost a year ago. Goldenberg and Miller said that since the group shared Airnoise with its members in December, residents have filed more than 65,000 complaints to JFK, and over 2,600 to LaGuardia.
“We have to be the watchdogs for our communities,” Miller said. “That’s the only way for us to solve this issue.”
“I don’t think that I did anything that was particularly great,” McCann said. “It was just putting together some pieces that I found and knew would work together, and then just improving on that idea over time.”

Have an opinion on plane noise in Nassau County? Send your letter to the editor at ngrant@liherald.com.