Speeches & Testimony

Chair Lee, Vice Chair Inouye and members of the Committee:

First, mahalo for highlighting and pursuing a critical issue that increasingly risks the public safety and disrupts the daily lives of residents and visitors in all corners of our Hawai’i: the virtually unregulated operations of commercial tour helicopters and small aircraft. 
 
Based on my constituents’ continued concerns on this issue, I fully support S.C.R. 158, which advances our efforts to reclaim our skies and ensure the safe and peaceful operation of air tours throughout the state consistent with the public good.

COVID-19 has obscured the increasingly risky and disruptive effects of commercial tour helicopter and small aircraft operations over the last year. But make no mistake: the air tour operators fully intend to resume and expand the pre-COVID status quo as soon as possible, as we already see happening with a resumption of operations. 
 
That status quo saw widespread and worsening safety concerns, including in 2019 alone three fatal accidents with twenty-one lives lost. The same is true with on-the-ground community disruption, with operators refusing to adopt or comply with any reasonable restrictions on time, place and manner of operations to address such disruption, even refusing or subverting reasonable efforts to track operations in order to specify and confirm complaints and areas of concern.

Clearly, self-regulation has not worked and will never work, and, despite all attempts to pretend that they are responsive to community concerns, air tour operators will continue to make every attempt to avoid any reasonable restrictions and to dismiss public concerns. Only substantial regulation at all of the federal, state and local levels of government will achieve a reclamation of public skies for operations that are safe and non-disruptive.

The tour operators are acting with impunity to public concerns because they believe that the public, through you and the rest of our state and county governments, are powerless to actually do anything, that their operations can’t be regulated at the state and county level. First, this is not true, as there is a zone of permissible state and county government regulation even under existing federal law, and this zone should be utilized to the maximum extent possible. But second, what is true is that our federal government, through the Federal Aviation Administration, apparently does not believe that it currently has sufficient regulatory authority to regulate the national, public airspace to address the severe disruption of such operations throughout Hawai'i. 
 
The current situation and the actions of communities throughout Hawai'i seeking to address the safety and community disruption risks of commercial air tour operations are fully spelled out in S.C.R. 158. 
 
As noted there, on the federal level I recently reintroduced H.R. 389, the Safe and Quiet Skies Act, in Congress to require the Federal Aviation Administration to take specific steps to improve safety and reduce community disruption. My measure would also expand the zone of permissible state and county regulation of commercial air tour operations toward the same goals, make these flights safer and reduce the noise from these flights. Attached to my testimony are a letter to my colleagues on the Safe and Quiet Skies Act, a section-by-section summary of the bill and the text of the bill itself. 
 
S.C.R. 158’s support for my bill, H.R. 389, will allow me to confirm to my colleagues in Congress that public concerns with air tour operations are widespread and statewide, contrary to the implications and even outright misrepresentations of the air tour operators that these concerns are isolated and limited. 
 
I would greatly appreciate this Committee’s and the Hawai'i State Legislature’s support of this concurrent resolution, and I look forward to working with you and a very concerned public toward reasserting public control of our skies.

Thank you again.