East Hampton Airport Closure Blocked As TRO Is Issued By Judge

A state judge on Monday afternoon issued a temporary restraining order blocking East Hampton Town’s plans to temporarily close East Hampton Airport at midnight on May 17.

State Supreme Court Justice Paul J. Baisley issued his ruling at about 5 p.m. on Monday afternoon, May 16, following hearings in a Riverhead courtroom earlier in the day. The judge simply signed a boilerplate TRO request submitted by attorneys for three separate sets of plaintiffs who sued the town over the closure, and he offered no comment on the merits of the case.

The plaintiffs include the charter aircraft booking company Blade, the owners of several hangars at the airport and a group calling itself the Coalition to Keep East Hampton Airport Open, and residents of neighborhoods near other airfields in Montauk, Southampton Village and Westhampton who say they may be affected by increased air traffic if East Hampton’s proposed new regulations are implemented.

The ruling puts on ice the town’s plans to close the airport for 33 hours and then “reactivate” it Thursday as a technically new, private airport with flight limitations that town consultants had said could reduce air traffic at the airport by as much as 40 percent.

Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said the town would not seek a stay of the judge’s order from another court, as an attorney had suggested they could, and would return to court on May 26 to plead their case to have the TRO lifted.

But how the town’s plans could proceed if and when the injunction is lifted is up in the air, as many of the steps taken to prepare for the transitioning to a new airport required advance notice and complicated changes to aviation guidance programs. The town had originally planned to effect the temporary closure in February but delayed, at the FAA’s urging, to allow the new airport’s needed flight guidance systems to be ratified by the federal agency.

Van Scoyoc said on Wednesday morning that it was unclear what the current status of the airport even is.

“We put out a notice last night saying the airport is not closing, but we aren’t sure what procedures are in place now,” Van Scoyoc said. “We notified the FAA that we were rescinding the closure — but I don’t know what can be undone at their end. The charts say JPX now, as far as I’m aware. I don’t know what the FAA can do about it at this point.”

Just before the TRO ruling came down, Supervisor Van Scoyoc had said that he hoped the judges hearing the injunction requests would allow the town to move forward, because ultimately reining in aircraft traffic will serve the desires of the aviation groups better.

“I hope this does not happen, because it really jeopardizes the future of the airport,” he said. “If we are not able to make reasonable and meaningful changes, permanently closing the airport becomes a real possibility.”

For the past 85 years, East Hampton Airport has been identified in the aviation area by the call letters HTO. The new airport, to be known as East Hampton Town Airport, was assigned the call sign JPX — a moniker assigned at random by the FAA.

As part of the anticipated shift to a new airport, the FAA had approved new guidance instructions for aircraft approaching the airport and had planned to deactivate the old HTO guidance systems at midnight on Tuesday. Van Scoyoc said the town was still unsure as to whether that happened or not even though the airport didn’t close.

“Everything was in place, we were all set to go, but we aren’t sure if all those things are still in place or what,” he said. “We and the FAA worked very hard to have an orderly transition, and now it just looks like chaos. It’s out of our hands.”

The transition that the town had negotiated with the FAA would have allowed the newly private airport to adopt a “prior permission required,” system, or PPR, which is common at small private airports throughout the country — including at Montauk Airport.

Through the PPR system, the town had planned to implement a package of limitations on flights at the airport, including overnight curfews, a one-trip-per-day cap on commercial aircraft and most helicopters and jets and an outright ban on the largest private jets.

But three groups of airport users and local residents filed separate lawsuits challenging the move under the state’s environmental review laws, claiming the town had not adequately considered the potential adverse impacts of imposing flight restrictions on other regions of the South Fork where flights pushed out of East Hampton might flock to instead.

Three previous judges had recused themselves from the case, claiming various conflicts of interest, before the case landed on Baisley’s desk last week. Baisley is also the judge presiding over contempt of court allegations brought against the town by attorneys for Amagansett homeowners who sued to stop the use of the beach in front of their neighborhoods by 4x4 vehicles.

Late on Friday, the judge granted the plaintiffs in the case a hearing on a request for temporary injunction, over the objections of attorneys for the town who said the TRO request had already been rejected by a previous judge. The plaintiffs noted that the previous TRO request actually had been withdrawn voluntarily.

News of the TRO being issued hit just as attorneys for the town and the National Business Aviation Association were getting started with a hearing on a second TRO request in federal court.

The NBAA, an advocacy group for a broad consortium of aviation industry businesses, filed two motions in U.S. District Court on Saturday, one accusing the town of contempt of court for proposing to enact essentially some of the same rules that the court had barred it from enforcing in 2017, and a second asking for a temporary restraining order blocking the town from closing the facility for 33 hours this week, as planned.

“Despite the critical role that the airport plays in the local economy and the national aviation system, the town has hatched its latest scheme to restrict operations there to appease certain constituents,” the federal lawsuit reads. “Previously prevented by this court and the Second Circuit from imposing restrictions at the airport because it failed to comply with the Airport Noise and Capacity Act … the Town Board has now conjured a new plan to impose noise and access restrictions through a 33-hour paper closure.”

After being sent Baisley’s ruling, District Court Judge Joanna Seybert said that in light of the TRO being granted in the state court, there was no reason to continue with the federal hearing. Attorneys for the NBAA said they were concerned that the town could seek a stay in state court that would allow the closure to go through.

Along with the lawsuits, the FAA is also reviewing a petition by two East Hampton charter pilots claiming that the rules proposed by the town violate federal aviation laws that limit how flights can be restricted by airport operators.

In a notice added to the petition docket on Friday, an FAA official said that the agency has not approved the town’s PPR rules and has not yet determined whether its approval is needed. But, the official said, the agency “strongly recommends” that the town hold off on implementing its PPR rules until the issue of compliance with federal law was settled.

Attorneys for the town who helped craft the PPR rules have said they think the restrictions could reduce flights into the airport by as much as 40 percent, primarily through eliminating multiple flights per day by charter helicopters and seaplanes.

Town Board members have said that reducing flights is seen as the only way to achieve meaningful reductions in noise impacts on neighborhoods around the airport while keeping the airport open.