Fwd: Terminate The Redesign: Quiet Rockland's Appeal To New FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt
Thomas Sullivan
John J. Tormey III, PLLC
217 East 86th Street, PMB 221
New York, NY 10028 USA
(212) 410-4142 (phone)
(212) 410-2380 (fax)
Quiet Rockland - No New Flights Over Rockland County, NY
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
P.O. Box 918
Pearl River, NY 10965 USA
(845) 735-9691 (phone
(845) 735-0476 (fax)
VIA E-MAIL:
and U.S. MAIL
Thursday, April 2, 2009
J. Randolph (Randy) Babbitt, Administrator – Office of the Administrator
U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
Orville Wright Building (FOB10A), Routing Code AOA-001, Room #1015
FAA National Headquarters - 800 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20591 USA
Re: Quiet Rockland Asks You To TERMINATE FAA’s NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign (“Redesign”)
Dear Randy:
You will recall that when I contacted you on Thursday, February 19, 2009 by e-mail about the FAA-planned Redesign, a time prior to the White House selecting you as FAA Administrator, you responded to me both by first name, and immediately. My community and I appreciate, and we have not forgotten, your professional responsiveness, courtesy, and willingness to listen.
My salutation to you above notwithstanding, I am forwarding this letter, itself a formal 49 U.S.C. §40103(b)(2) notice and appeal, to what I expect are your new agency coordinates - but I will also “bcc” this letter to your prior coordinates which I have on file for you as well.
I regret to see that the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign is still listed on the www.faa.gov website as an agency objective as of today. That’s a mistake. But then again, as of today, FAA had yet to replace Lynne Osmus’s photo with yours on the same website where it says “Administrator”. It’s time that FAA updated its website. My objective is not simply to get the Redesign pulled from the www.faa.gov website, but also to get the Redesign pulled from your and FAA’s consideration entirely.
The Redesign must stop.
1. Litigation Links. You will also recall that when I replied to you on Friday, February 20, 2009 by (further) e-mail, I asked that you please not rely upon aviation publication accounts of the Redesign, in favor instead of the pleadings and sworn statements from the multi-plaintiff litigation currently pending before the D.C. Circuit. Further to that, I ask that you please review the links posted at the following Uniform Resource Locator (URL), to the extent that you may not by now have already had an opportunity to review those same litigation documents:
http://ejectsturgell.blogspot.com/2009/03/lets-look-at-record-thanks-to-steve.html
Sunday, March 29, 2009
“Let’s Look At The Record - Thanks To Steve Taber And NJCAAN”
2. The Pleadings. What you will see in those web-linked documents, are the pleas of many communities including my own, and many individuals including me, wronged by past harmful and unlawful conduct by FAA officials at the behest of aeromercantile lobbyists who collectively care nothing about our safety and quality of life. Meanwhile, these people and FAA broke multiple federal laws including NEPA, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Clean Air Act; not to mention 49 U.S.C. §40103(b)(2) and our rights to due process under the Constitution of the United States of America. I’m confident that the D.C. Circuit will agree with me, with Rockland County, and with the other dozen-or-so petitioners who are currently suing FAA - the agency you inherited. If you come to divine differently, naturally I would want to know the specifics as to why.
3. Quiet Rockland. As you are also aware from our prior correspondence, Quiet Rockland is an organization that I co-founded based in Pearl River, New York. In our opposition to Redesign, we have fought FAA, USDOT and others, since July 2007. We have blown-through a few temporary Administrators and other FAA personnel adversaries, to reach this day – (none of whom, I note, ever gave me the courteous and prompt honest response that you did in your February 20, 2009 e-mail, Randy).
As for me, I am committed to lawfully fighting Redesign with every single fibre of my being until the day that I die. I’m not moving.
4. Our Numbers. Quiet Rockland acts consonant with the interests of thousands of citizens in Rockland County, NY and elsewhere: approximately 47,000 in the Town Of Orangetown, NY; 300,000 in Rockland County, NY; and a staggering 30,000,000 people affected by the planned Redesign in the Northeast. As I have observed in correspondence to President Obama and others, that’s enough votes to carry a re-election in 2012. But more importantly than that, we are many human beings who have been in the past denied justice from within, by our own government. All of us in Quiet Rockland continue to be threatened - directly and adversely affected by the FAA’s NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign. Our movement started as a result of noise and other environmental concerns. We since have joined forces with whistle-blowers, ATCs, and other aviation professionals in continued efforts to foster aviation safety going forward. We ask you, please, for your personal attention and help. Your response is vitally important. We want you to join our numbers.
5. Terminate Redesign. Quiet Rockland asks that you immediately withdraw with prejudice the US$60,000,000+ failed boondoggle of the prior administration known as the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign. It never made sense to put between 200-600 new jumbo-jets per day over densely-populated and minority-laden neighborhoods in Rockland County and our neighboring locales. We need environmental justice, a restoration of sensibility, and peace. Irrespective of however many airline lobbyists have sought to contact you this week promising the moon and stars, we need cancellation of the Sturgell/Peters/Mica Airspace Redesign. The litigation dollars already wasted on it are justification enough for the end of Redesign. That same money could have fed and educated children. The cited time-savings numbers per flight for Redesign were always illusory and fictitious, and no one from within the transportation community even takes them seriously anymore given the severe diminution in air-traffic resulting from recent economic market corrections. Crowded skies came from purposeful aeromercantile over-scheduling and over-saturation, premeditatively engineered to post hoc “justify” Redesign. We ask that you act as regulator and simply not let that charade happen again.
6. Accord Professional Respect To ATC’s. Additionally, the American people including Quiet Rockland call for you to treat and pay all Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs) and Aviation Inspectors fairly; protect them from threat and harm; and listen to them. NATCA’s members need a real contract. Whistle-blowers need to be accorded protected status in gratitude for their personal courage. The ATCs and Inspectors are the true aviation professionals. Their input is vital to the future of American aviation safety, and they have suffered to a wholly-unacceptable degree during the failed Blakey/Lynne/Osmus FAA regime. We ask that you please make this country’s amends to them, and now. It’s what the citizens and traveling public want, too. FAA should take care of its people. FAA should stop taking care of lobbyists with no agenda but their own.
7. Instill The Culture Of Safety. The American public including Quiet Rockland must have a federal government that restores, to quote learned Congressman James Oberstar, a “Culture Of Safety” in aviation. An FAA “partnership program”, on the other hand, wherein the Agency abdicates its legally-mandated function as regulator and instead adopts a cozy economic pandering relationship unabashedly calling the airlines its only “customers” - is a grotesque, harmful, and abysmal dynamic, and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. The “customers” are, in point of fact, the passengers and the overflown people on the ground. Federal law requires consideration of both, a fact that the failed Sturgell/Osmus FAA conveniently and consistently forgot.
8. Re-Populate The Dysfunctional FAA. The failed Sturgell/Osmus FAA must immediately be re-populated with responsible federal officials. People like Airspace Redesign “Project Manager” Steve Kelley need to be fired. A former ATC who once worked a 6-fatality mid-air crash over Fairview and Cliffside Park, New Jersey (the falling metal and bodies landed in both towns), Steve Kelley must not be kept in a position wherein he is allowed to facilitate placement of traffic patterns over densely-populated neighborhoods. FAA publicist-enablers like Jim Peters who have overtly antagonized NATCA in the media must be given their walking papers now, too. The FAA FOIA unit, including people like Douglas Murphy and “Duke” Taylor, should be fired en masse. We now need government officials who tell us the truth.
9. The Rights Of The Overflown. The January 4, 2009 web-post on Tampa Bay Online gave us the happy news that President Obama would:
“…direct the [A]dministrator of the Federal Aviation Administration to restore morale and improve working conditions and operations”, and “appoint an FAA [A]dministrator who ‘will not play politics’ with the safety of American travelers”.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jan/04/na-obama-outlines-administration-goals/
We’re grateful for this, and we have since asked President Obama to please add one additional goal of 6 words in length to that worthy mission-statement.
As you are aware, 49 United States Code §40103(b)(2) reads in relevant part:
“The Administrator [of the Federal Aviation Administration] shall prescribe air traffic regulations on the flight of aircraft (including regulations on safe altitudes) for -- ...(B) protecting individuals and property on the ground”. [Emphasis added].
WE’RE the “individuals… on the ground” – in densely-settled and oft-minority-populated areas of Rockland County, New York and elsewhere in the Northeast. When FAA, Marion Blakey, and “Bobby” Sturgell proceeded with the cram-down of the FAA’s Airspace Redesign over the past few years, they acted in purposeful disregard of – inter alia – the requirements of environmental justice, and the federal legal obligation to protect Rockland County citizens on the ground and protect our property. FAA, Blakey, Sturgell and their enablers violated 49 U.S.C. §40103(b)(2). To turn back this Blakey/Sturgell riptide of illegality, we ask that you acknowledge revision of the above-cited mission-statement with 6 words of added as text bold-underlined below:
“…the [A]dministrator of the Federal Aviation Administration will restore morale and improve working conditions and operations, and will not play politics with the safety of American travelers or those Americans overflown by them”.
Quiet Rockland would appreciate your assurance that you will protect us overflown folks on the ground, too - and that you will act now to terminate the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign, and accomplish the other worthy goals cited hereinabove.
We look forward to your reply, Randy.
Respectfully,
John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland - No New Flights Over Rockland County, NY