Current Paths
Sky Harbor
The FAA created three new dangerous departure flight paths that head to the northeast from Sky Harbor Airport. Virtually all flights on that departure direction follow a "rail" represented by the red lines. The populous communities, schools, parks and recreational facilities below the rails get all of that air traffic and would suffer catastrophic ground casualties in the event of an aviation mishap.
The yellow line represents all the arriving air traffic when it approaches from the east. You can see that certain communities get a double whammy from the FAA by having a high percentage of continuous air traffic to/from the airport being directly overhead.
The Solution
Sky Harbor
One reasonable solution is to move the red departure rails to where they used to be: over unpopulated mountain terrain, other unpopulated terrain or commercial areas that would provide a high level of ground safety.
But the best solution is to move the three paths to the green track, which is in use for other flights and takes air traffic over a river bed into unpopulated terrain and provides the absolute lowest level of environmental and safety impacts.
By moving the yellow arrival rail slightly south, it would then criss cross the departure paths either over the mountains or the 101 freeway; areas where ground safety would be highest and aircraft noise would not be noticed.
These would not be complex changes for the FAA to make. Not only would these new routes be safer, they would be just as efficient as the present routes.
Please scroll down
This FAA map represents current east/northeast bound flights out of Sky Harbor. SCANA has inserted arrows to show the 3 offending flight paths and two possible solutions.
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We are fortunate that the geography east/northeast of Sky Harbor provides areas where there is little or no population that common sense would say should be used for noisy, dangerous departing aircraft. The FAA has prioritized marginal airline benefits as more important than the public's safety and environmental well being.
The Solution
Scottsdale Airport
This is a map of the original flight paths out of Scottsdale Airport prior to the NextGen implantation at Sky Harbor. The airport has wide corridors that planes can fly within but the new NextGen Sky Harbor flight routes caused flight paths at Scottsdale Airport to be moved and more tightly placed within the corridors. SCANA recommends the paths at Scottsdale Airport be restored to the original corridor locations shown (green and yellow lines) once the NextGen flight paths from Sky Harbor are relocated as shown above.