The Town of East Hampton, Long Island has brought a challenge at the United States Supreme Court, seeking to reverse the November 4, 2016 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which invalidated East Hampton’s local ordinance prohibiting flights from East Hampton Town Airport between 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. and “noisy” aircraft flights between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. The Second Circuit decision was predicated on East Hampton’s purported failure to comply with 49 U.S.C. 47524(c), which limits the grounds upon which local operational restrictions may be imposed to those in which “the restriction has been agreed to by the airport proprietor and all airport operators or has been submitted to and approved by the Secretary of Transportation . . .” In addition, Section 47524(d) contains six express exemptions from the limitations, none of which apparently applies to East Hampton.
Although its spokesman, Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, asserts that “with the stroke of a pen, the Appeals Court decision has federalized our airport and stripped us – and the thousands of similarly situated airports – of the ability to exert local control,” in fact, the Airport Noise and Capacity Act, 49 U.S.C. § 47521, et seq. (“ANCA”), containing those prohibitions did that long ago. ANCA was originally enacted in 1990 for the express purpose of protecting against “uncoordinated and inconsistent restrictions on aviation that could impede the national air transportation system.” 49 U.S.C. § 47521(2). It was not, therefore, the Second Circuit, but rather the United States Congress, that preempted local control of airport noise.