Increased activity/flight schools routinely ignore the city’s voluntary guidelines requesting no more than five touch and goes. This flight school plane conducted thirteen. This is a common occurrence.
Let’s ensure all communities concerns are counted
What we do
We seek common-sense behavior from the flight schools and anyone that uses our airport, to comply with FAA guidelines requiring pilots to consider the impact on other pilots and on communities surrounding airports.
We believe
We believe effective strategies can be applied by the City of Fernandina Beach to mitigate the excessive increased traffic problem while ensuring our airports long-term safety and sustainability.
Our action plan is on the last page below
Help us prove the impact
Click here to log a complaint with the FAA
Amelia Island residents from all over the island say airport noise is a major concern. Add your voice below.
Click here to complete the airport survey
We love our airport and strongly support the value it brings to our community but increased activity without contribution is eroding it’s value.
Our concern is the volume of flight-school training operations that repeatedly fly takeoff, low-pass, and comnduct landing patterns over nearby homes without financially contributing to the Airport. And this activity is significantly increasing and has increased dramtically in the past three years.
Unlike passenger flights or local pilots who depart and/or arrive, training circuits repeat every few minutes, often from early morning through the evening.
This activity creates safety concerns, noise and congestion, contributes to airport wear and tear, and generates millions in revenue for businesses outside our community while providing no financial support for the maintenance, sustainability, community harmony or technological growth of our Airport.
We are not opposed to the Airport or aviation. We are asking for reasonable, common-sense measures—higher pattern altitudes, varied training routes, better pilot communication, and financial contributions that will make our airport safer and reduce the impact on residents living directly below. The stats are in and these activities will no-doubt continue to increase year over year.
The first step is understanding the full scope of the issue and showing officials how many communities are affected. That is the purpose of this log.
Use the log below to add your voice, volunteer, attend a meeting and/or canvas your neighborhood.
Log your experience
Your report joins the record. Be specific where you can — dates and times make the strongest case.
- Our Action Plan – We request that citizens, city officials, Nassau County commissioners representing Amelia Island and the FAA work together to address this problem.
The Fernandina Beach airport is surrounded by residential communities. We have no commercial property buffer.
Our workshop has been scheduled for Nov 4th
On Nov. 4, 5 p.m., we will present our concerns about the future of the airport at a Fernandina Beach City Commission workshop. Please attend to show your concern over management of the airport so that the facility coexists peacefully with residents.
We have asked the city commisioners for a workshop so that we can show what’s possible and what other cities just like ours are doing to address the increased traffic and to create opportunities and a safer airport. Kissimmee Airport the Future of Aviation is Here
Municipal airport proprietors can leverage their legal rights and empirical data from platforms like Virtower to establish non-discriminatory fee structures and operational rules targeting repetitive flight behaviors rather than pilot origins. Implementing such data-driven frameworks helps ensure that high-frequency, non-revenue traffic contributes equitably to ongoing airport maintenance, infrastructure repairs, and technology upgrades. For further regulatory details, visit Federal Aviation Administration. [1]
The below photos are examples of the exorbitant activity with a blatant disregard for airport guidelines.
This also shows several planes at the same time over our communities. This raises safety and environmental concerns. This excessive airport use also raises concerns about our airport’s sustainability as these planes DO NOT contribute to the airports need for maintenance, ongoing repairs and technological safety upgrades.
The Plan
- Our Action Plan – We request that citizens, city officials, Nassau County commissioners representing Amelia Island and the FAA work together to address the safety and noise concerns including, but not limited to the following:
- Use runways strategically to reduce noise and dBA limits of flight school planes.
- Issue stricter voluntary noise abatement guidelines that go beyond the five touch-and-go request. Stricter guidelines could include flight school use of the airport during certain hours of the day, holidays, weekends. And track to enforce these voluntary guidelines
- Implement FAA-approved options for managing repetitive training operations.
- Explore the FAA Part 150 Noise Compatibility Program to ascertain FAA-approved strategies for noise mitigation.
- Explore FAA-compliant fee structures, including infrastructure airport sustainabilty fees based on landings, patterns and repetitive activity
- Formulate a plan for the city airport manager to release quarterly reports to city staff and the public with data on how the highly repetitive airport use is being managed safely.
- Increase communication with flight schools, including regular meetings, to present the quarterly reports and discuss the findings.
- Distribute noise-abatement maps, reminders and strategies to the flight schools on a regular basis.
- Combine the city’s legal rights as an airport proprietor with empirical data from Virtower, to legally structure fees and operational rules that target the behavior (repetitive training noise) rather than the origin of the pilots and commit to ongoing monitoring, as flight school activity often ebbs and flows and has increased significantly over the past three years.
- Meet with the FAA Regional Ombudsman to discuss noise abatement and seek the FAA’s cooperation in meeting the city’s goal of logical fee structures and fair market pricing for the airport’s increaed use
- The Virtower Advantage: Virtower automatically tracks tail numbers, calculates exactly how many circuit loops an aircraft performs, and logs the aircraft’s home base. The city can directly link Virtower’s data export to an automated billing service (like PlanePass) to send monthly invoices to the neighboring flight schools. [1, 2] This is already being done at other Florida airports.
- Why it Complies: It does not discriminate against outside schools. If a local pilot performs 10 touch-and-goes, they pay the same fee.
- For airfield fees:
- the sponsor establishes a rate base;
- capital and operating costs are allocated to cost centers;
- allocation must follow cost causation;
- airfield fees generally may not exceed the capital and operating costs of the existing airfield facilities and services; and
- when a cost-based methodology is used, fees charged to a user or user group cannot exceed the costs allocated to that user or group. (Federal Aviation Administration)
- FAA specifically identifies allowable airfield operating costs including:
- personnel;
- maintenance;
- equipment;
- utilities;
- police;
- ARFF;
- administrative/managerial overhead;
- roads and grounds; and
- utility infrastructure.
- Capital costs can also include debt service, debt coverage, and reasonable reserve/contingency funds associated with airfield capital costs. (Federal Aviation Administration)
- The correct approach:
- Airport airfield costs → allocation methodology → transient-user share → proposed fee → expected revenue
- Commission an environmental noise assessment undertaken by neutral party that would not involve the participation of residents or flight schools.
- Disregard the standard FAA noise survey process as it involves a data sample from morning until night which, as we all know, skews the data since most repetitive, multi-aircraft maneuvers happen during the daylight hours.
- Involve citizens, such as a member of Amelia Island Airport Solutions Group in updating the city’s Airport Master Plan to address repetitive maneuvers.
- Establish an Airport Solutions Working Group. Since the abolishment of the Airport Advisory Committee, citizens no longer have a dedicated forum to express airport concerns and questions.
Amelia Island Airport Soluti 