LONGMONT — A 1½-year legal dispute between a Longmont skydiving company and anti-skydiving noise advocates will go to trial Monday in Boulder County District Court.
Kimberly Gibbs of Gunbarrel, Gibbs’ organization Citizens for Quiet Skies and six other individual plaintiffs sued Mile Hi Skydiving over the noise Mile Hi’s planes make when flying over Boulder County homes.
Mile Hi flies its planes out of Longmont’s Vance Brand Municipal Airport, particularly a purple DeHavilland Twin Otter. The planes leave the airport, reach altitude in a flight box that reaches out over unincorporated Boulder County, drop the skydivers and return to the airport.
Gibbs and others with the Citizens for Quiet Skies group have been speaking for years at meetings of the Longmont City Council and the Airport Advisory Board, saying that the Twin Otter is particularly noisy as it ascends and descends. In the lawsuit, they argue that even though Mile Hi is ultimately governed by the Federal Aviation Administration, the court should still be able to stop its operation from being a nuisance. Others in the city say that the people who complain about the noise are being overly sensitive about the planes and the skydivers.
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