East Hampton Delays Airport Closure, Says FAA Can Restore Most Services Before Summer Season

Faced with a platoon of legal challenges and new assurances from the Federal Aviation Administration that it would be able to help smooth the transition of East Hampton Airport from a public facility to a private, town-controlled one, the East Hampton Town Board this week voted to put off its plans to temporarily close the airport until May.

The board is, however, pressing ahead with plans to craft new limitations on flights in anticipation of transitioning to a private airport by the start of the summer season and will unveil a proposed package of new restrictions at its work session next Tuesday, March 1.

After conferring with attorneys in private at a virtual meeting last Thursday, February 17, the five members of the Town Board voted unanimously to push back the planned temporary closure by more than two months, until midnight on May 17, and to re-open the airport under the new private designation 33 hours later, at 9 a.m. on May 19.

Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said during the meeting that town officials had met with representatives of the FAA the day before and came to an agreement “acceptable to both parties” on a new timeline that would allow the town to effect the temporary closure of the airport and reopen it as a private airport, with a “phased-in” restoration of the flight services that the airport currently offers: namely, GPS instrument approach guidance and the use of the control tower to direct incoming aircraft.

Later in the week, Van Scoyoc said that the meeting with “top-level” representatives from the FAA had a “cooperative spirit” that lead the town to agree to delay its moves.

“To be fair, this is a very novel situation,” the supervisor said. “The FAA has never been faced with these kinds of questions and decisions, and neither have we. There has been a very cooperative spirit, and we feel confident that we’ll be in good stead with them by agreeing to wait until May.”

The May transition, the FAA has said, would allow the airport to reopen with its weather reporting systems and air traffic control tower online immediately upon the reactivation of the airport. It is unlikely that instrument flight rules, or IFR, would be available immediately, but the supervisor said the town does not expect a “significant” additional delay in completing the protocols that would allow the FAA to issue new IFR guidance for the airport.

“During the most recent meeting, the FAA noted that it expects to have all of its internal processes completed for the opening of the new private-use airport, except for introduction of instrument flight procedures, no later than May 19, 2022,” the supervisor said in a statement following the February 17 meeting. “At the meeting between the town and FAA on February 16, 2022, the FAA agreed that this postponement will enable the FAA to complete internal processes aimed at delivering a safe and solid foundation from which to operate a private-use airport and will also allow for reinstatement of instrument flight rules procedures at the private-use airport as soon as practicable.”

The board had originally planned to close the airport at midnight on February 28 and reopen it at 9 a.m. on March 4. The initial plans had been to reopen the airport without any new restrictions on flights and continue operations as it has until a new package of rules could be crafted, presented to the public and approved by the board.

But after that plan was approved in mid-January, the FAA’s regional administrator, Marie Kennington-Gardiner, sent the town a letter saying the town was misguided in thinking it could reopen the airport so quickly with the same bevy of flight support services it has long offered — claiming it could take the FAA up to two years to restore all those services.

On February 15, three separate groups of litigants filed lawsuits against the town challenging the plans for a temporary closure. All three cited the Kennington-Gardiner letter as evidence that the town’s proposal would have much more significant impacts on the neighborhoods surrounding other airports in the region, primarily Montauk, Southampton Village and Westhampton.

All of the lawsuits included residents of Montauk — which could potentially see thousands of additional helicopter flights each year if the East Hampton Airport were to close entirely — but were anchored by organizations with deeper pockets: including the charter flight booking company Blade, which relies on East Hampton Airport for a substantial portion of its business, two LLCs associated with the owners of private airplane hangars at the airport, and a group calling itself the Coalition to Keep East Hampton Airport Open.

Airport advocates have also voiced concerns that anti-airport groups will mount their own legal campaign to derail the reopening of the airport during the short window in which it is closed.

Van Scoyoc said on Tuesday that the Town Board remains confident its plans and the deliberative process it has followed will withstand legal scrutiny, the reservations of the FAA and the technical hurdles and will prove to be a boon to the community through tamed skies when new flight restrictions are in place.

After years of being rebuffed by the FAA and pilots in its efforts to rein in the din of aircraft over residential neighborhoods throughout the East End — driven primarily by increasing numbers of charter helicopter flights — the town gained a new weapon in September when the last assurances from FAA grants accepted by the town in the 1990s and early 2000s expired: the power to close the airport.

But rather than full and permanent closure — something advocated for by a small but growing segment of the local population in recent years — the town’s attorneys advised that the town could close the airport but then quickly reopen it as a technically “new” airport. Doing so, the attorneys have said, would give the town the option of declaring it a private facility, despite its municipal ownership, that could dictate whatever rules it saw fit for who could and couldn’t use the airport — something federal law precludes at public airports.

The town has said it will adopt a prior permission required system allowing it to set, and adjust, parameters for which flights may come to the airport. Public discussions of what the new rules will look like have been scant, but have touched on the possibility of daily or weekly quotas on various categories of flights.

Even with the town’s stated resolve to continue on its chosen path, the decision to delay the transition was met with applause from pilot groups and the expressed hope that the delay would present an opportunity for more negotiations about alternatives to closure.

“East Hampton Community Alliance applauds the decision of the Town Board to delay the closure of HTO,” Erin Sweeney, president of the EHCA, a local pilots group, said in an email on Thursday. “We remain hopeful that productive discussions with the town and airport users can avoid any type of closure and be the basis for a new future for HTO and our community.”

A spokesman for the Eastern Region Helicopter Council, which represents professional helicopter pilots, also pleaded with opponents to stop the legal warfare against the town and take the opportunity of the delay to try and negotiate reasonable limitations.

“We are pleased the East Hampton Town Board is starting to listen to common sense solutions and delayed their plans for the airport to allow for more discussions and alternate solutions,” the ERHC spokesman, Loren Riegelhaupt, said in a statement. “For everyone’s best interests, we ask that all sides stop filing lawsuits and implore the town not to rush ahead with their misguided plans to close the airport. Instead, we suggest that all of the impacted parties come together to find a solution that works for all.”

On Monday, the National Business Aviation Association published an account of the debate also expressing a modicum of relief at the town’s delay — to an extent.

“We are encouraged by the town’s willingness to delay and to remain engaged with aviation stakeholders on shaping the future of HTO,” said Alex Gertsen, the group’s airports and group infrastructure director. “That said, NBAA remains very concerned about the flawed plan to close HTO and reopen a new airport.”