A plan to limit helicopter and prop plane flightseeing tours over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been caught in a federal quagmire for the past five years.

Currently parks have no say in flightseeing tours overhead. Only the Federal Aviation Administration regulates air space, an authority it covets closely. The impacts of flightseeing on caribou migrations in Glacier, nesting condors in the Canyonlands or the solitude of hikers on the Appalachian Trail aren’t factors the FAA goes by when deciding who can fly where, when and how low.

As a result, there are no flightseeing restrictions in any national park except the Grand Canyon. There flights below the rim have been limited. The reason is due to safety concerns following helicopter crashes, however, not due to intrusions of low-level flights on wildlife and visitors seeking the solitude of the canyon.

That changed in 2000 when Congress passed the National Park Air Tour Management Act. It requires the FAA to develop flightseeing rules for 120 national parks and puts each national park on equal footing with the FAA in signing off on the rules for that park.

“The FAA does control airspace and they jealously protect that. The park, however, was deemed to have the expertise when it comes to judging impacts to the park,” said Bob Wightman, a Smokies ranger who monitors aviation issues for the park.

Five years later, the FAA has failed to develop rules for a single national park, however. The delay prompted the General Accounting Office to launch an investigation at the behest of five concerned congressman, including Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Democratic who champions Smokies issues.

“The requestors feel the implementation has been delayed. The act was passed in April of 2000 requiring air tour management plans be put in place ... and here it is 2005 and there have not been any air tour management plans created yet,” said Wyatt Hundrup, senior analyst with the General Accounting Office.

The FAA seems to have perked up since the General Accounting Office began its investigation. The park service, the FAA and an advisory committee composed of commercial air operations and environmentalists met in Gatlinburg in February, signaling the Smokies could be among the first in line for flightseeing rules, possibly as early as 2006.

How it will work

Each park will conduct an environmental impact study to determine the impacts flightseeing operations are having on both wildlife and visitor experiences. Options will range from banning flights completely to the status-quo free-for-all. Or the park could designate sensitive areas off limits at certain times of year — like bald eagle nesting grounds in spring — or simply specify how low planes and choppers can fly.

In the meantime, flightseeing operations over national parks are supposed to file for an interim permit. The permits are intended to keep flights over national parks at current levels until flightseeing rules could be implemented.

“Existing operators would be allowed to continue flying over the parks in numbers equaling what they did the previous year or the average of the previous three years,” Wightman said.

There was one major flaw, however. The FAA had no idea how many flights were being conducted over parks.

“There’s no requirement that the operators log those flight paths,” Wightman said.

Instead, granted permits are based on whatever numbers flightseing companies reported.

It was like pulling teeth to get the interim flight numbers from the FAA, according to Karen Trevino, with the park service’s Natural Sounds Program.

“After two years of asking, I just got the applications from FAA,” Trevino said. “Unfortunately the numbers we got back from the air tour operators aren’t very reliable. We found a lot of inaccuracies over that.”

Flightseeing companies claimed 1,920 flights annually over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Cherokee Helicopter and its sister company on the Tennessee side of the park, Great Smoky Mountain Helicopters, claimed 120 annual flights over the park. Rambo Helicopter Charter claimed 1,800, according to FAA records.

The delay in complying with the Air Tour Management Act isn’t solely the FAA’s fault, Trevino said. It will take tens of millions of dollars to conduct environmental impact studies for 120 parks, money the park service doesn’t particularly want to spare.

The FAA got some money from Congress when the act was passed, but has been reluctant to share it with the park service. As a result, the park service is stuck with the cost of conducting the extensive environmental analysis for each park, a tall order given the $600 million annual shortfall the park service faces for basic operations — let alone the $7 billion backlog to repair crumbling visitors centers, campgrounds and historic structures.