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May 25, 2015- Fortune Magazine writes about local helicopter noise, “Some New Yorkers have a great trick to beat Memorial Day traffic: They pull up an app to summon Blade, an Uber-style helicopter service that whisks passengers to posh destinations like the Hamptons.
But not everyone is rooting for Blade to succeed. Some New Yorkers hate the very idea of it—and not because it’s yet another tech startup aimed at the rich. Manon Gauthier, a film editor who lives in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, described her beef.
“I don’t like helicopters at all. It seems that there are more and more of them in Park Slope. I don’t remember hearing them when I first moved here nine to 10 years ago,” Gauthier says. “With the police interventions, tourist tours and the Hamptons commuters my residential neighborhood is getting more and more noisy.”
Gauthier is hardly the only one who has grown fed up with the constant whup-whup-whup over their heads. A coalition called “Stop the Chop,” founded in 2013, is mustering pressure to bring down the helicopters.
The group’s president, Delia Von Neuschatz, says the choppers bring virtually no economic benefit to New York, while creating a major nuisance for the millions of people who live under their flight paths. She adds that Stop the Chop, which has 2000 members drawn from riverside neighborhoods like Battery Park and Brooklyn Heights, is using its newfound non-profit status to raise money and muster political and legal challenges.
Von Neuschatz also says that Blade is less of a nuisance than the sight-seeing helicopters that swarm city skies, but that the problem is already out of control. “The commuter traffic is only a fraction, but the last thing the city needs is more helicopter traffic,” she says. “Absolutely, it will exacerbate things.””