Using stop.jetnoise.net (an app developed by a local man), it's very easy to identify obnoxiously loud flights, including their altitude. While it doesn't work 100% of the time----occasionally there will be a flight directly over my house, and it says that the flight could not be identified---it still records the ones you earmark.

A bonus to this app is that you can also see how many complaints there were each day, and by how many people. It definitely makes you realize that you are not alone, when there were 17,000+ other complaints made the same day.

The vast majority of SFO flights are coming in under 6,000 feet. Many are coming in under 5,000 feet. The majority I notice turn out to be United Airlines. We were not under a flight path---or even near one---when we moved to Portola Valley, and I deeply resent that we are under one now.

The solution is simple: move the flights back over the Bay, where they belong. Stop vectoring the huge planes from Hong Kong, UAE, having them do a tight turn at low altitude directly over highly populated areas.

When you can see the cockpit window, then read "EMIRATES" on the bottom of the fuselage as it passes over your head (justas though you were taking an eye test at the optometrist) the plane is way too low. Dangerous.

Congress members are deflecting responsibility. Congress passed legislation in 2012, FAA Modernization and Reform Act, that permitted the FAA to implement NextGen procedures without any regard to their impact on humans and the environment. The Wake Recategorization or Wake Recat procedure is the key to our misery. Aircraft are brought low into denser air so they can be flown slower and closer together resulting in the skies above communities near and far from airports having been taken over as arrival and departure queues. And if there are new concentrated flight paths, don’t confuse that with fewer concentrated flights paths. These concentrated flight paths are proliferating as the goals to date that Congress, the FAA, and aviation industry are primarily concerned about are more and more flights, increasing capacity endlessly, and quicker frequency of arrivals and departures, increasing efficiency. Human health and the environment are being sacrificed for the goals and for an abstract term, the economy. What economy really means with NextGen procedures is industry profits and elected officials who ensure those profits keeping their political office. What it means for citizens is committees, roundtables, task forces, noise studies, noise complaints, initiatives, reports, surveys, and so on until citizens are worn down into silence and acquiesce to the air, noise, and visual pollution of 24/7 low altitude aircraft all over our skies. Furthermore, the ultimate strategy of elected officials, FAA representatives, and this industry is to pit groups against each other, make them fight each other for non-solutions, crumbs, and discredit themselves in the process and then say, Well, sorry but we don’t seem to be able to come up with a regional solution. And yet they rig it from the start by telling different groups to come up with solutions.

Groups must stand together and not get played liked this. The industry has the money and too many officials are bought. But we have numbers and when we use the power of those numbers we can’t be stopped. Keep fighting, together!

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