STOP THENOISE

Courts rule Nuisance is a State Matter
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Mass Nuisance Lawsuit Settled
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Misinformation
 on the Web
 

President's Position 
by Bill Burgoyne
April 2008

Settlement is neither victory nor defeat. So what is it?

The civil nuisance lawsuit in Massachusetts. is over. Sometime around the beginning of 2008, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement. The details of the settlement are confidential. However, the parties involved have issued a joint statement regarding the settlement. You can read the joint statement here.

Now I'm not a lawyer, but it appears to me that:

The five plaintiffs in this case fought hard for five years to get to this point. Along the way they set important precedents that we can use to take on the next cowboys who decide not to behave in our skies. They have established that private citizens may sue pilots and aviation businesses for nuisance in state courts. More correctly, they have blown away the pilots' long-held, but never challenged assertions that they are above state law and answerable only to the FAA.

Without knowing the details of the settlement, I can not know what concessions were made by either side. I do know that this fight is not over. It is not over until a court rules that  when a property owner says "Not here. Please go away." that the pilot must comply or face serious, unavoidable consequences. That will require seeing a case through to a trial and a decision by a judge. When and where the next lawsuit will be I do not know. I do know that there are several likely lawsuits waiting to happen. We stand ready to report the details on this web site.

During the past five years STN has been repeatedly asked for information regarding this lawsuit. One of the reasons for this was the initial misinformation by the aviation press that STN was a party to this lawsuit. While STN was not a party, all of the plaintiffs were members acting on their own. As a result STN was able to report on the progress of the suit. What people have been telling me is that they are ready to sue. Unfortunately they all wanted to see how the Mass lawsuit would turn out before committing. As a result, the folks in Mass had to go it alone. They did well enough to set precedents at the federal and state levels. They did well enough to make the pilots' wish to avoid a trial and settle.

Now it is time for all the others to engage. The Mass lawsuit has shown that a nuisance suit is not frivolous as the pilots had claimed. It has shown that the pilots do not feel confident about defending themselves in state court against a claim that their activities constitute a nuisance.

Had the folks in Mass been victorious at trial, it would not have meant that victory on a nuisance complaint was a sure thing for others. At trial the plaintiff must still demonstrate nuisance in his individual circumstances. However, now getting to trial with a claim of nuisance is more of a sure thing. The pilots' false claims - of being subject only to the FAA, and that the states had no jurisdiction over them -  have been removed from their arsenal. Pilots must now answer to a claim of nuisance based upon the merits of the complaint - not by claiming that they fly above the law. This was the biggest expense in terms of both calendar time and legal expenses. Bob Casey has paved the way. Use the road.

So what can be said about the settlement of the Mass nuisance case. Well, to borrow a line from the great Winston Churchill,
"this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The next steps are up to you. We are here to help and to tell the story.

Bill Burgoyne   
President, STOP the NOISE