Judge to San Jose International Airport: decide on exemption or lose your curfew.


Can you say Keystone Kops? I knew you could!

So, it seems that the San Jose International Airport is in danger of losing its curfew . Currently, night landings after 11:30 PM and before (I think) 6:30 PM are forbidden, or fined, or something. (the reason I'm not sure is I recently flew to San Jose from Portland on a flight that was delayed 4 hours, and we landed at 2:00 AM. Maybe the airline paid a fine, but no one met the plane to arrest the pilot!).

I know this should go into the Local Interest Blog, but I've been interested in Airports and noise issues since I started flying a few years ago. So it goes into the main Blog...

Anyway, some background: Larry Ellison, the flamboyant CEO of Oracle Software owns a plane that, fully fueled, weighs 95,000 pounds. San Jose has an ordinance that prohibits landing between the above named hours by planes that weigh over 75,000 pounds. Ellison violated the curfew repeatedly, daring San Jose to do anything about it. While this seems like nothing more than the antics of a guy rich enough to buy the whole city and who doesn't care about anyone else, Ellison actually had and has a point: the ordinance is ludicrous, because the gating factor is weight, when it should be noise, since the purpose of the ordinance is noise abatement. And Ellison's plane is in fact far quieter than many planes weighing less than 75,000 pounds. So Ellison offered a compromise: he would have the plane placarded so that it could only carry fuel up to the 75,000 limit. It would meet the legal restriction, and the noise would be, if anything, less than landing at a heavier weight, and everyone would be happy.

San Jose should have taken this deal. It's still a huge mystery to me why they didn't. It met both the letter and spirit of the law, and I feel sure that the city would have been able to preserve it's curfew where it counted. But the city officials were afraid of setting a precedent that would lose them the curfew altogether.

So the city said no. Ellison kept landing at night, and the city finally threatened to sue. Ellison beat them to the punch and sued first, mainly to get the issue decided (maybe he was tired of taunting and being
threatened by the city, I don't know). And the judge handed Ellison a resounding victory, crafting the decision in such a way that it doesn't set a precedent that would sweep away the curfew. Irony of ironies, shortly after Ellison won, he re-based his plane in Stockton, so he didn't use his hard-won legal landing status very long.

No along comes the SabreCats, a local football team (though I've lived in San Jose 25 years an only have heard of them through the cited article. Guess I'm no football fan!) Anyway, the SabreCats have a Boeing 727 that's not only heavier than the weight limit, but is the noisiest plane that lands at SJC. But Ellison's victory of a couple years ago have emboldened the 'Cats to request a variance to land, based on the fact that it's a stage 3 non-commercial plane. They hired the same lawyers Ellison used, and I think they are appearing before the same judge that presided over Ellison's case.

And San Jose is reaping the consequences of it's own unwillingness to decide these cases. They held Ellison off until he got mad enough to sue, and they apparently are playing at the same thing here. So that the judge finally told the city to make up its mind, or he'll nullify the entire curfew.

San Jose is between a rock and a hard place on this, because FAA regs won't allow them to change the current curfew laws; if they do, the FAA will step in and nullify the law (or at least it's a risk the city takes). And now, they are having to nullify their own law anyway by requests for variances on various grounds. This will be certainly interesting to watch...

Posted: Wed - June 25, 2003 at 09:42 PM        

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