Someone Complained Almost 2,000 Times About Mather Airport Noise Near Sacramento

A single person in Folsom complained to Sacramento County nearly 2,000 times last year about noise from Mather Airport.

Complaint logs from Sacramento County show that in total, the Department of Airports received 2,181 complaints in 2024 for all the aircraft facilities it oversees: the Sacramento International Airport, Sacramento Executive Airport, McClellan Airport near North Highlands and Mather Airport just outside of Rancho Cordova.

The logs, released to The Sacramento Bee in response to a Public Records Act request, show that 1,969 of the noise complaints came from one ZIP code in Folsom. All but one of those reports were regarding aircraft at Mather Airport; one was about McClellan. All but five of the Mather comments from the Folsom ZIP code — 95630 — had the same general format and used similar language.

The closest homes to that ZIP code, according to Bee research and U.S. Postal Service data, are about 7½ miles northeast of the facility — through several published approaches show landing paths that fly over the ZIP code.

The Folsom complainant references the potential damage from repeated and stressful sounds hundreds of times. Residents and taxpayers, they told the department, “should not have to deal with the noise or the health risks.” Noise pollution is not just an annoyance; research shows it can have negative health effects. It can cause heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and mental health problems, according to studies by the International Commission on Biological Effects of Noise and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, among others.

The publicly available logs from the Department of Airports confirm that a single person fired off almost all of these complaints. Those less detailed logs show that one individual made almost every complaint that the department received about Mather from that ZIP code last year.

Almost all of the person’s complaints begin with the words “extremely loud noise from aircraft,” “extremely loud noise from airplane,” or “unacceptable and excessive loud noise.” They note the time and date in the same way, and many go on to make similar points. More than 1,300 comments note that the noise is “not improving.” According to county data, more than 74,000 aircraft operations — takeoffs and landings — took place at Mather last year. Nearly 80% of them were made by general aviation — typically small jets, propeller planes and other private civilian aircraft.

The records released to The Bee show that the department received one complaint in January and one in June 2024 from the Folsom ZIP code that did not fit the language patterns of the others: One comment was blank, and the other discussed never experiencing noise like this from the airport, then asked how to proceed. In May, two complaints about Mather from 95630 did not match the others: One was blank, the other said, “The 55 decibal noise standard was violated twice within 2 minutes ... Extremely noisey, way beyond the normal noise level.”

The fifth complaint from ZIP code 95630 that deviated from the recognizable pattern appeared in October. It was a brief remark about a “loud and low-flying helicopter” and did not match the stylistic traits typical of the bulk of the submissions. Despite this, county records show that all 211 complaints from that ZIP code that month were attributed to the same individual.

Comments from residents in other ZIP codes followed different patterns.

One El Dorado Hills resident contacted the department on May 9, 2024, to complain about a Mather jet with two words: “So loud!” A Sacramento resident complained about the Sacramento Executive Airport a month later, on June 9, 2024: “For two Sundays starting around 5:30am a white Cessna type plane has been continuously circling the airport. Isn’t there a time limit for noise on Sunday mornings? It’s waking up myself and the neighbors.”

But the persistent Folsom resident takes a much firmer tone, apparently spurred by near-constant aggravation. On Dec. 22, 2024, the resident was woken up at 3:29 a.m. and began to complain. They submitted comments to the county at 3:40, 4:18, 5:22, 5:23, and 5:25 a.m. Among other things, they wrote, “Unacceptable that (aircraft) circle over residential neighborhoods early morning when there is unpopulated areas near by.”

According to flight records archived by online flight tracking service FlightRadar24, only one plane was flying over the Folsom area at that time: An Airbus A321 operated as JetBlue Flight 734. At 3:29 a.m., according to FlightRadar24, it was flying northeast nearly 23,000 feet above Folsom during its scheduled flight between San Francisco and Boston.

The only other planes in the skies above the capital region at that hour came at 3:35 a.m. when a Boeing 767 operating as an Amazon Prime Air flight followed an identical flight path at 30,000 feet; another Airbus A321, JetBlue Flight 2416 from SFO to New York’s JFK, followed a similar track at 3:53 a.m. Not all aircraft are visible on FlightRadar24 because it only shows flights with public tracking data, but no other aircraft were spotted within 25 miles of the ZIP code at the time.

FlightRadar24’s list of departures and arrivals also shows no published takeoffs or landings at Mather during that time. Flight logs show a UPS jet landing from the southwest at Mather from Ontario in Southern California just before 3 a.m. and another UPS freighter that flew over Folsom as it landed at Mather from Louisville at 7:42 a.m. Both planes departed during the 5 o’clock hour, records show. The next flight out was a single-engine prop plane that took off six hours later, according to FlightRadar24.

On Christmas Eve, the Folsom resident complained to the Department of Airports 12 times. The first complaint was about a flight in the wee hours of the morning: “Extremely loud noise from airplane at 2:19 am on 12/24/24. Please enforce the noise abatement procedure, which is to be in place from 10:00 pm to 7:00 am. Please correct the noise issue from your aircraft. The noise is not improving and my family would like to get some sleep. Thank you.”

FlightRadar24 had no records matching any plane over the Folsom ZIP code at that time.

That complaint was submitted at 7:58 a.m. The individual submitted six more complaints before 8:30 that morning.

The person did not complain on Christmas Day last year. On Dec. 26, however, they were disturbed by a plane and began writing to the county at 5:25 a.m. “Extremely loud noise from airplane at 5:03 am...” the log says. FlightRadar24 shows only one plane over Sacramento skies at that time — a China-bound cargo plane flying over Arden Arcade at 36,000 feet.

Last year, the person in Folsom told the county “my family would like to get some sleep” 627 times. On 136 occasions, they fully woke up and began to complain before 6:30 a.m.

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