What’s up with the helicopters?
This report is coming to you from your New York correspondent, here on family business…
The Breakfast-Cabal mail list is abuzz with news about helicopters flying over Berkeley today.
Art Medlar wrote: “…there’s no place to go to get an immediate answer to the general question, ‘what’s up with the helicopters?’ For the most part, the online edition of the Oakland Tribune tends to post breaking news long before either the Chronicle or the Daily Planet, both of which are equally hopeless on that front. Attempting to get the info from the websites of the actual news companies involved is beyond laughable.”
“It would seem like there’s an opening for someone like inberkeley.com to add a ‘helicopter’ tag and become the default source of info.”
Art, let’s see what the InBerkeley.com readers know about the helicopters…
David Rowland adds: “I live near Willard Park, and about once a year something happens that draws the news copters to our area. Although it’s very expensive to keep them up there, if nothing else is happening they will linger for hours, making square miles of noise. I have called the FAA noise complaint line and the individual stations when I can determine which are involved. I think the word gets through, and it may have some effect.”
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It must be a north Berkeley phenomenon. There’s nothing overhead in the Elmwood. We had the news helicopters last night because of the fire on the east side of the Caldecott tunnel, but nothing now.
I saw helicopters in Orinda yesterday afternoon responding to a brief grass fire. Are we talking about yesterday or today?
Oops.. looks like I should have read more closely. @james
I work here on campus, and I’m always astonished that the Daily Cal isn’t on top of these things. I mean, this is their beat, right? Assuming, as it seemed when I looked up at the sky, that the helicopter were lingering around campus (seemed like they were up around Memorial Glade).
Um… are we really sure there was anything all that unusual here? Could it be that this is a case where, sure, it was an “up” day for helicopter traffic but it was the first day that a certain clique of people really noticed it?
My observations of what is “normal”: almost daily traffic choppers around the highways. Almost daily medical emergency helicopters crossing over Berkeley. Frequent apparent tourist, hobbyist, or private commuter flights. Circling police helicopters every few weeks in connection to hot pursuits related to serious crimes. Very occasional military transport flights. (Also, some military jet or transport plane traffic now and again.) It’s not necessarily anything all that unusual going on.
As for noise complaints: good luck with that. Looking at the FAA materials, it looks like if they are not regular and mostly stay above 1,000 ft., and don’t hover for “too long” – with exceptions for all kinds of reasons – not much will change. If it turned out that there was, say, a tour company flying low and hovering for extended periods: that’d be a different story.
What I’d like to see cut back are the stupid prop-plane-with-banner ads and even the big ads on the side of the Airship Adventures blimp. We don’t need that in the sky anymore than we need those trucks that do nothing but tow a moving billboard around city streets.
Although (and with apologies to Dave), a helicopter conspiracy could make some sense. It would all fit together. There’s been this Comcast truck parked in front of my place for weeks now, man. It’s freakin’ me out!
-t
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-10-01/article/33840?headline=Firefighters-Battle-Blaze-Near-Fish-Ranch-Rd.
You guys should really read the newspaper more often if you want to know what’s up.
Thanks for the advice and comment, Becky. I love newspapers and read them voraciously.
We posted about the Fish Ranch fire as it was happening, at 3:30 on Tuesday. So we knew about that, and even referred to it again in the first comment above. The helicopters Dave’s friends were wondering about were on Wednesday morning, and not related to the Tuesday fire.
s@Lance Knobel
@Lance Knobel
@Lance Knobel The fire people told us that on Wednesday they were making sure the fire didn’t flare up again–all part of the same story, though we didn’t add a new report.