The National Business Aviation Association is hoping Trenton, N.J., will use a carrot instead of a stick to deal with perceived noise problems at busy Trenton Mercer Airport (TTN). The airport authority has instituted a voluntary curfew period between midnight and 6 a.m. to quiet down the neighbors. But while it’s asking aircraft operators to be nice, it’s threatening those that don’t play along with publishing their N-numbers. NBAA Interim President Donald E. Baldwin said in a letter to the authorities that the move seems to be “a punitive and discriminatory attempt indirectly to transform a nominally ‘voluntary’ curfew into a coercive one.” Baldwin likes the Teterboro and Westchester approaches better. We can understand why. Instead of vilifying noisemakers at TEB and HPN, they reward those who comply with the voluntary curfew in place there. Every year, TEB and HPN authorities hand out Good Neighbor awards to operators who don’t fly when most of us are trying to sleep. Baldwin told the Trenton folks that the positive reinforcement not only works, it generates “goodwill, rather than confrontation, between the public and business aviation community.”
