‘It’s 6:00 a.m. I can’t get back to sleep. They have been coming and going for an hour now. Another passenger jet at 5:00 a.m. headed for Chicago.’”

Richard Langseth

To the Editor,

A note from a T.F. Green International insomniac:

Just woke up from a nightmare: Smiling air freighters full of smiling boxes of eCommerce stuff landing at Green in the pre-dawn. Smiling trucks headed for the new smiling warehouses.  Smiling airport execs pocketing bonuses. Yuck!

That pesky 5:00 a.m. flight taking off from Green to Charlotte rescued me from my dream. I hear it penetrates 20-year-old soundproofing RIAC put into the homes by the airport. The takeoff rattles the weather-worn vinyl window frames.

No wonder people are saying the noise is getting worse at Green. The 5:00 a.m. counts as 10 daytime takeoffs in the noise calculation.

It’s 6:00 a.m. I can’t get back to sleep. They have been coming and going for an hour now. Another passenger jet at 5:00 a.m. headed for Chicago. Then a whole bunch more. How come so early? RIAC promised: No flights before 6:00 a.m.

I looked it up on the new www.flyri.com website. RIAC says the old curfew is gone. FAA requirement: Airport needs to service flights all night long. So, the airlines are flying out of Green earlier and earlier and coming in later and later.

I watched the Secret Life of the Worlds Busiest Airport on Amazon Prime the other night. Could not sleep. It shows Atlanta Airport’s first passenger flight at 6:00 a.m. -- Voluntary Curfew.

What is the noise calculation for all these flights? Maybe the equivalent of 120 or more pre-dawn takeoffs. For the home buyout formula, each takeoff equals 10 flights! Far wiser to buy out those houses on Strawberry Field Road – and other places – than to put up a useless noise berm.

The 6:00 a.m. to Reagan in D.C. just took off. Maybe somebody is checking in with our congressional delegation. I found the FAA noise complaint phone number on the RIAC site. Called them. Disconnected phone number is for a Dupont Circle residence in D.C.

I can’t get back to sleep.

Dozing off, another nightmare: the Frontier plane with the bear hanging onto its tail – the red eye from the Rockies now flying to Bradley near Hartford. I can’t get it out of my head. Frontier pulled out of Green. Our taxpayer subsidy ran out. They took the money and ran.

We drove over to Bradley the other day at dawn to drop off our son for his flight to Denver. The new enormous Amazon warehouse at Bradley was awesome. Trucks tooling around the place with all those Amazon Smiles.

Now we get 1:00 a.m. arrivals at Green. Beats coming back from Logan or Bradley in the wee hours. But, what about the people trying to sleep through the reverse thrust roars? Shakes their beds in their so-called soundproof homes. 

Each late-night flight adds ten flights to the noise study. Are we up to the equivalent of 350 flights per day because so many overnight flights should be counted as ten flights each?  More home buyouts? Nope. RIAC does not have the funds for that.

Mr. Ahmad, the RIAC CEO, plans to borrow $70 million for his air cargo operation. It’s the new eCommerce thing. Use air freighters to get around the New York trucking bottlenecks.

Mr. Ahmad needs another $30 million from the state and the feds. This is the “why” for the environmental study. Need environment approval or no money.

And we need a new noise study! This would add millions more to the air cargo project. All to bring in cargo planes from Boston so that FedEx delivery trucks can drive the packages back to Boston. This is madness. Mr. Ahmad says only one or two flights more. But, he needs $120 million for them. Need to buy out some houses too for $20 million or so.

That would be about $60 million per plane. I don’t believe it.

This God-awful air cargo future was hushed up 15 years ago at the secret FAA Providence Marriott meeting. The old EIS Plan snuck in 20 to 30 freight operations per day in and out of Green. But we caught them then, and FAA backed off!

Mr. Ahmad brings it back. His new Master Plan cuts that zombie nightmare into small pieces, hidden, once again, from the public. The goal? Capture the Boston eCommerce package delivery market. 20 to 30 freight operations per day. Noise equivalents? 150 flights or more. We need a new noise study.

Now it is 6:35 a.m. Still can’t get back to sleep. But at least the morning rush of flights out of Green is slowing down.  Jet Blue left 15 minutes ago. The steady hum of road traffic and birds singing is picking up.

It is now 7:47 a.m. I have been editing this piece for an hour. Have not heard a single plane taking off lately. There probably have been some but it is pretty quiet now that day has arrived. Back to sleep.

Richard Langseth

Warwick