A fleet of F-35As, the military’s newest fighter jet, could be flying out of Barnes Airport next year, at a higher volume and frequency than the

Westfield’s “Sound of Freedom” about to get Louder

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2024-09-27 02:30:05

A fleet of F-35As, the military’s newest fighter jet, could be flying out of Barnes Airport next year, at a higher volume and frequency than the airport’s current fleet. But hardly anyone is paying attention.

Larry Hansen has lived in the same house on Holyoke Street for the past 50 years. If he gets his way, it will soon be razed to the ground.

Hansen’s house is in the flight path for the 104th Fighter Wing’s F-15C jets out of Barnes Airport, a civilian airport owned by the city of Westfield that hosts the Air National Guard as a tenant. The noise from their multiple daily flights is a constant source of irritation and distress for him. By 2026, a fleet of newer jets, twice as loud as the F-15C, will be flying over Hansen’s house at nearly double the frequency they are now. He hopes that the city will buy his house and demolish it like they have others several miles down the road.

The Air National Guard’s noise study for the fleet upgrade, released in February, places Hansen’s residence within an area exceeding 70 DNL — a cumulative metric that includes all noise events occurring in a 24-hour period with a nighttime noise weighting applied to events occurring between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., according to the National Guards’s noise study (p. 14). This classification makes the residence eligible for purchase and razing under a federal law concerning “airport noise compatibility planning.”