Jay Davis cannot escape them. He hears the helicopters in his home office, in the park above Long Island Sound, and, most annoyingly, on the enclosed porch where he and his wife eat dinner and watch “Wheel of Fortune” with the closed captions on. “I don’t want to continue to live like this,” the 53-year-old realtor and attorney in Larchmont, N.Y., told the Journal. He knows it is a champagne problem. In Westchester County, most are.
The choppers are bound for the Hamptons, carrying people trying to beat the traffic and get a few more hours at the beach. They cross the Sound Shore — where homes routinely fetch over $1 million and summer sounds are supposed to be sailcloth and firepits — as often as every 15 minutes on Fridays and Sundays. “Call it the 1% vs. the rest of the single-digiters,” the Journal writes.
The teenager with the missile-warning app
The most useful participant in the argument is 16. Mateo Lallemand, a sophomore at Rye Country Day School, built an app that cross-references noise from a microphone near his house against the FAA registry and FlightRadar24 and spits out each aircraft’s operator, tail number and heading. He modeled it on the Ukrainian tools that track incoming Russian attacks. “The Ukrainian system is triggered by the sound of a missile or drone. But in our case, it’s a helicopter.” The data show Hamptons flights by operators such as Flexjet at around 1,000 feet, a fraction of the cruising altitude they advertise. He gave it to his congressman, George Latimer, whose office is now working with the FAA.
Flexjet’s helicopter president, Eli Flint, has an answer: after last year’s fatal collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet over Washington, controllers told pilots to make more room for airliners into LaGuardia. “That’s why we’re at 700 to 1,000 feet. We know it’s an issue.” Nobody alleges the routes are illegal.
The class politics write themselves. An investment banker downloaded two tracking apps and wonders aloud whether hedge-fund and private-equity executives are to blame after a yearslong bull market. A French-born software engineer in Mamaroneck loves his deck barbecues, “except for fly-bys on summer Fridays and Sundays.” On NextDoor, a Larchmont resident got “’Nam flashbacks”; a Vietnam veteran in Yonkers replied, “I enjoy the flyovers. Welcome home.” And Bonnie Lasek, whose family supplied textiles to Ralph Lauren and who summered in the Hamptons for years by car: “You should just thank God you can hear them.”
Our read
There is no planning move here except the one the story is about, which is that arriving does not end the comparison. The people on the Sound Shore did everything a plan asks — earned it, bought the house, got the quiet — and the thing that bothers them most is the sound of someone doing slightly better. Behavioral economists call it relative deprivation; this desk calls it the reason so many plans are built to beat a neighbor rather than fund a life.
The useful antidote is the teenager’s. He did not stew. He measured. He turned a feeling into a tail number and an altitude and handed it to someone who could act. That is exactly the move we ask of anyone who feels vaguely behind: get the number, and the feeling usually gets smaller.