Brewer Presses Mamdani on Helicopters
Former Manhattan Borough President (and current City Council member, representing the Upper West Side) Gale Brewer is requesting that Mayor Zohran Mamdani intervene in the ongoing dispute between local residents and the operators of helicopter tour flights. In January 21 letter to the Mayor, she requests a meeting, “along with representatives from Stop the Chop NY/NJ, to discuss the much-needed ban on non-essential helicopter flights operating over New York City. These flights are responsible for significant amounts of noise and air pollution, safety risks, and poor quality of life for residents and visitors under their flight paths.”
In a series of proposed state and federal laws over the last several years (all of which have failed to be enacted), “non-essential flights” are defined helicopter trips used for tourism, air-taxi services, and private charters. Those proposed bills all contained carve-outs that would continue to allow “essential” helicopter flights, defined as sorties by the military, law enforcement, fire personnel, air ambulances, and news organizations, plus emergency landings.
Stop the Chop (a grassroots coalition of waterfront residents in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey that is lobbying to scale back helicopter tours), estimates that more than 80,000 non-essential helicopter flights travel over New York City annually. Ms. Brewer cites a report by the City Council’s Committee on Economic Development that documented more than 59,000 noise complaints made to 311 about these trips in 2023. “Non-essential flights are more than a nuisance,” she says. “New Yorkers are exposed to 80 to 100 decibels of noise with each helicopter flight that passes. And each helicopter emits up to 40 times the emissions of a traditional gasoline-powered car.”
She adds that Lower Manhattan’s Downtown Skyport (the city-owned helicopter landing facility on Pier 6 in the East River, south of the ferry hub at Pier 11/Wall Street), “currently has cap of 29,650 tour flights per year, which allows for more than 80 flights per day.” She notes that a helicopter that crashed in the Hudson River last April, killing all six people on board, originated from this facility and was on its eighth flight of the day.
Ms. Brewer concedes, “to the credit of New York City heliport operators, they have been willing to come to the table and negotiate,” citing a 2016 agreement that limited helicopter tour operating hours, restricted flight paths to waterways only, and capped the total number of sightseeing flights. “But nearly 30,000 tours still take off from Downtown Skyport each year and they are the largest source of helicopter noise pollution,” she contends. “Additionally, chartered air taxi services and sightseeing operators based in New Jersey are not bound by this agreement. Their flights cross and hover over our parks and residential neighborhoods, disturbing recreational spaces, public performances, and homes.”
Provisions of this agreement may soon be modified. Ms. Brewer’s outreach to the Mayor comes as the Downtown Skyport operator is proposing to expand the hours during which tour flights take off and land, arguing that such a change will reduce overall noise complaints because it will cause tour flights based in New Jersey (which operate under fewer restrictions) to relocate to Manhattan’s more highly regulated environment.
A spokesman for Mayor Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment on Ms. Brewer’s letter.