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2 Answers

Flying over the same spot for years on end.

Asked by: 3300 views
Flight Instructor

A flight school is operating over my neighborhood. They literally come to my neighborhood about 10-15 days per month. This has been happening for the last 6 years.

They have different patterns that they fly, several circles and some straight line flying with turns. This all occurs over my neighborhood. On many days and nights I have an airplane (Cessna) flying past my house every 3 to 4 minutes for 6 to 8 hours (with refueling). I have observed people in my neighborhood and noticed that they react to noise while talking to others Sometimes a helicopter comes to my neighborhood for hours.

It happened today again. About 8 hours of flying around my neighborhood. The plane flew over my house about every 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

The airport that the flight school uses is about 42 miles from my home. The airport is out in the country away from the large city that I live in. A 42 mile radius circle has about 5500 square miles.

My neighborhood is not in some unusual location or far removed from nearby airports. We lived in the area for about 50 years and this has never happened before. The closest airport shut down about 20 years ago. The closest airport is now 11 miles away and is larger than my neighborhood. It is used by commercial jet aircraft. The neighborhood is about 5500 by 4500 feet. The flight school never ventures outside the boundaries of my neighborhood. I was hoping that the pilot could avoid repeatedly flying closer than 2000 horizontal feet to the same spot.

I already know that the pilot is not doing anything illegal. Below are several examples of legal flying.

Repeatedly flying over a televised golf game.
Repeatedly flying over a home (trumps restraining orders and anti-stalking laws).
Approaching/harassing wild life such as whales or a herd of walruses (a stampede can kill young walruses). Federal laws that include hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in fines and years of imprisonment do not apply.
Repeatedly flying over a cruise ship.

Do flight schools practice noise abatement by not flying over the same spot (closer than 2000 horizontal feet) for years on end? Is my situation unusually or the norm?

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2 Answers



  1. John D Collins on Jun 08, 2018

    Pilots are regulated to maintain minimum safe altitudes as follows:

    Sec. 91.119

    Minimum safe altitudes: General.

    Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
    (a) Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
    (b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
    (c) Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.

    That is what is legal. It is common for flight schools and flight instructors to use training areas to practice ground reference maneuvers. These maneuvers can involve turns about a point, S turns across a road, or flying a box kind of pattern. A “good neighbor” school or Instructor should avoid any congested area and always comply with the regulations. If you know the airport where the aircraft are coming from, I would suggest a friendly call to the airport management and or any flight school. There are bound to be open country where this kind of practice can be accomplished. I recommend you not be confrontational, but just explain your complaint and request that to the extent possible, instructors avoid your built up area. Give them a GPS location, ideally a latitude-longitude, google earth can be used for this purpose.

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  2. Home Owner on Jun 10, 2018

    Thanks for the quick reply, Mr Collins.

    We contacted the airport a few years ago. The flying over our neighborhood went from every good weather day to 10-15 days per month.

    To our horror, we realized that the FBI was conducting the flight training. The FBI stopped flying over our neighborhood about 3 years ago. It was replaced by the DEA flying over our neighborhood. The airport is over 40 miles away.

    Most of the time the flying is 100% perfect circle flying for hours. I guess the pilot is flying using auto pilot. This goes on for 6 to 8 hours per day (with refueling). I guess the pilot is trying to accumulate required flying time.

    The flying rules and regulations do not apply to law enforcement. We have had low flying aircraft and helicopters circling our neighborhood at night with no navigations lights on. I guess they were learning how to use night vision stuff.

    I have a hard time finding info on flight schools behaving badly, except for the government.

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