Last week the Supreme Court rejected Modi'in Municipality request to issue a temporary court injunction to forbid the night flights over the city. The court decided so after it received the State's response to the Modi'in Municipality petition, and given the Court's ruling, it appears that the Court found the State's answer to be more persuasive.
The impact of this decision is that the flight will continue over our heads for many more months, until the legal process is concluded. The date for the first hearing in the Supreme Court has been set for October 11th, 2010 at 9am. The discussion is open to the public.
Clear Skies obtained and reviewed the State's complete response to the Modi'in Municipality petition. We found several interesting points in the State's response to Bagatz:
1. It turns out that the Modi'in Municipality misled the public when it announced on July 5th that it first heard about the need to open a window for night flights only July 1st. The State's response discloses on p. 9 that the Modi'in Municipality was fully briefed on June 13th about the need to open a night flights window.
2. The new LDA landing path over Modi'in went into effect only on July 1st, and hence the Municipality had a window of opportunity to appeal against it before it became operational. Yet for some peculiar reason, the Municipality chose to do nothing, as well as to hide this information from the public.
3. The Municipality submitted its petition to Bagatz only on July 21st, a month and half after it first learned about the need for night flights, and 3.5 months after the decision published by the CAA (April 6th) on the landing path over the heart of the city.
4. This delay significantly hinders the chance of success of the petition, as is outlined in detail in pages 17-18 of the State's answer to Bagatz.
5. The State argues (in page 9) that the reason it needed to open the night flight window is because the Airlines said that the long distance flight, which are large planes carrying heavy cargo and fuel, cannot take off safely on runway 12 (to the East) due to the risk of collision with a mountain. They said that they would have to ship the cargo separately, thus it would not make it economical. Ergo, the argument for routing flights over Modi'in is rooted in the airline's profitability and not in safety considerations per se.
6. It's interesting to note that the Mayor of Holon, Moti Sasson, appealed to Bagatz in May against the State's decision to open a flight window over his city. Mayor Sasson's first request to issue a temporary injunction was rejected by the Supreme Court, but Mayor Sasson did not give up, and submitted a second request, and this time Bagatz issued a temporary injunction forbidding night flights over Holon due to commercial reasons, and allowing only flights due to safety reasons.
7. Thus Clear Skies calls upon Modi'in Mayor to follow Holon Mayor's precedence, and to issue immediately another amended request for a temporary injunction, rather than to wait for the court hearings and to have the residents of Modi'in continue to endure the noise of the night flights for many more months.
8. Clear Skies also learned from city council member Danny Rosenfeld that Egypt recently introduced a sanction forbidding Israeli planes to fly over the area of Taba in their instrument landing approach to Eilat airport. According to Rosenfeld, the CAA approved the use of a visual landing path to Eilat at night, despite challenging terrain. The CAA refused to allow a visual/RNAV (instrument landing system) at night over Ben Shemen forest, and insisted that all planes landing at Ben Gurion runway 30 at night be routed via the LDA path over Modi'in – and the result is the noise we hear at night.
9. Thus Clear Skies calls upon Mayor Bibas to challenge the CAA decision and to explain why it allows visual landings over Eilat at night, but not over Ben Shemen forest.
10. The State's response to Bagatz includes a detailed report of the flights over Modiin in July – the same report that city council Danny Rosenfeld requested in his proposal to city council meeting of July 14th that the Modiin Municipality publish to the public every month. Yet Mayor Bibas adamantly refused, and all of the city council members (except Alex Weinreb and Yitzhaki Hen) abided by Bibas's directive and rejected Rosenfeld's proposal.
11. The flight report confirms that there are indeed very high noise levels, and there are quite a few flights that exceed the 75dB levels.
12. Yet the Ministry of Defense of the Environment went out of its way in its statement submitted to the Supreme court to claim that the noise levels are not severe, basing their report on the first 12 days of July. The State claims (in p. 10 of its response) that the data for the rest of July, which included noisier days, was not handed at the time to the Ministry of Environment.
Clear Skies' conclusion is that the central government is adamant on implementing the landing path over Modi'in and that the Likud party, whose ministers are in charge of the Transportation Office (minister Yisrael Katz) as well as the Environment Protection Office (minister Gilad Erdan), are instruments in carrying out the State's plan.
The fact that Mayor Haim Bibas is an ambitious Likud member who strives to move on from Modi'in to national politics turned out to be a disadvantage, as we believe that if the ruling party was say Kadima, then Bibas would take off the gloves and fight this decision with full force – something that we think he did not wish to do given his close ties with his patron, Likud Leader PM Binyamin Netanyahu.
The result is that the residents of Modi'in got the short end of the stick, and we will need to suffer the noise of the flights for the next 15-18 months until the work on runway 26 is completed.
Clear Skies activist Ezi Shabi took still camera shots of the night flights from Emek Ha'Ela Blvd. (Tsipor/Cramim neighborhood) during the 90 minute night flight window and you can see the trail of the planes flying to the West. It's interesting to note that instead of doing the full approach over the heart of the city, a few of the planes can been seen making "shortcut" over Kaiser/Avnei Hen and joining in from the left in Ezi's beautiful photo. You can also see in the photo the stripes from the stars due to the Earth rotation.
For more details please see the post on our Hebrew website.
0 תגובות:
Post a Comment