this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
394 points (99.5% liked)
xkcd
9038 readers
172 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, that's usually a rural thing. And those are usually cropdusters manned by farmers who, while I may not agree with politically speaking (based on the 8500 flags per section of irrigation), are doing a very expensive component of their job. And even then it's usually farmers with massive acrages that necessitated a plane over a Sprayer Tractor. They might do tricks and stuff when turning around but excessive trick flying about is how you wreck your plane.
Sure some wealthy people do have these private little planes/helicopters for recreational use. But they're far from cheap and still must answer to the FAA during flight. They pay insurance by the hour when in flight, and lying/fudging numbers can cost your pilot licence. (Google says it can take about 6 months for your 20 hours of practice flight time you pay for, totalling approximately $10-20k)
If you have an issue with a pilot flying too low, call the local airport, Tower Control might just find out a new plane owner has not reported their flights.
If the pilots don't want to be blinded, they can negotiate with the people on the ground. Lasers are the only weapon most people have to fight back against aircraft violence and seek an equitable resolution. Pilots shouldn't be above the rest of the world, detached from all the consequences of their actions.
Noise is not violence in the same way that murder is violence. And if your issue is them flying near residential areas, that increases the likelihood of another, uninvolved, innocent person being injured or killed in the crash. As I said in my other comment, violence inflicted on bystanders is abhorrent and not acceptable. Noise is a nuisance, murder is a permanent bad "solution" to a temporary minor problem in this case.
Noise is absolutely physical violence and inflicting it on thousands of people at once is unforgivable.
If you're talking about the constant noise from bit mining operations and the like, I'd agree with you. But having grown up very close to a US military testing airfield, I disagree with the assertion that aircraft noise is anything more than a nuisance. Throughout the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a place where squadrons of C-130's would do take-off and landing drills over my neighborhood. While it was irksome, like all aircraft, they were limited to flying during certain times of day, excluding emergencies, just like personal or private aircraft are. I suffered no permanent harm from it, and to be honest, our neighbors blasting loud music all the time and late into the night was more of a problem than the aircraft.
I think you are focusing far too much and placing entirely unwarranted importance on this issue, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. It will win you no favors to burn any good will you have on this issue when there are others that are much more important problems.
When I lived in L.A., our apartment was on the flightpath of Burbank airport in one direction and my office/studio was in the flightpath on the other direction. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. After a few days, it just became part of life. All it did was make us have to re-take anything that was recorded if a plane flew over.
And this "it hurts autistic people" thing is silly. As if there aren't a huge number of places you can live in cities that aren't on the airport flightpath.
Later, I lived in South Gate, CA, which is another part of L.A. we were on the flight path of the Zeppelin NT, which was just about as loud as the jets, except it flew over really slowly and pretty low (you have never seen anything that big in the sky if you haven't seen it). I'm guessing Drag here would rant and rave about that too.
And then there were the police helicopters and the traffic helicopters that flew overhead wherever you were in the city. Fuck the police helicopters, but the traffic helicopters are pretty damn necessary until we eliminate the car problem.
Anyway, if you live somewhere with an airport where rich people keep flying in and out, you live in a place that's already pretty damn noisy without any aircraft being involved. We call them cities. If you can't take excessive noise, you shouldn't live in one.
My apartment at school is a couple blocks from the hospital. I can hear the air ambulance helicopter take off and land. It's profoundly less annoying than the active railway near the apartment in the other direction.
It seems like you don't have autistic noise sensitivity or migraines. When a plane makes noise that bothers thousands of people, autistic people will be harmed. People with migraines will want to kill themselves. Everyone is different, and the law needs to be able to protect the most vulnerable in society.
Being overly sensitive to noise isn't exclusive to people with autism, nor is everyone on the spectrum sensitive to noise.
It's as stupid an argument as saying we should destroy all the street lighting because of people who have migraines at night. Yeah, it really sucks having to deal with that. What sucks a lot more is unsafe streets because of the total lack of lighting.
There is no reasonable way to eliminate all noise and I can guarantee that there are sources of noise that are louder and more pervasive/frequent than aircraft that you could focus this ire on. If someone is really so sensitive as to suffer immense harm from the noise of aircraft in their area, they should not live in that area.
Before you start on some tangent about how small, rural communities have aircraft noise as well as large cities, I would like to inform you that those small airports can be a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our communities. I have helped care for a patient that had to be flown to our hospital in a small airplane from a rural community about 500 miles away because an air ambulance helicopter couldn't make the distance and a ground ambulance would have been too slow. Putting too many restrictions on small airfields, especially in remote communities could very easily cause actual fatalities, not just disruption or distress.