Aotea Great Barrier islanders fear they will go the same way as Waiheke Island with lots of helicopters buzzing their skies.
Aotea - Great Barrier Island Photo:
The isolated island has had five applications for helipads in five months.
The local board chair Izzy Fordham said she did not know what was behind the "flurry" but they needed to find out.
"We're just feeling we need to look at this issue more deeply than what we ever have had to before, and if possible, try to remedy it before it blows the beautiful serenity of Aotea," Fordham said.
She wonders why four of the five resource consent applications are for helipads along a short stretch of Greensides Rd, east of Medlands Beach and just 6km from Claris airport.
Auckland Council has so far granted one of the five.
That's the same as at Waiheke to the south, where one of the five applications that have been made in the last year has been approved, while one has been withdrawn, by the new owner of Obsidian Vineyards, Charlotte Lockhart.
"It was like, clearly this is something that the community don't want," said Lockhart, who dropped the bid after she bought the business in November.
Three other bids are still in the works, to add to the almost 50 helipads already consented on Waiheke since 2012, mostly from 2013-15.
The new applications have galvanised opposition - a local councillor Pippa Coom says she's had "hundreds of emails" - all the way to Parliament.
The Waiheke local board chair Cath Handley told MPs at a select committee hearing on the Civil Aviation Bill this week: "Our airspace is not uncontrolled, it's out of control.
"It's extremely dangerous."
Her board, and a lobby group Quiet Sky Waiheke, have been pushing on many fronts for months: Seeking tighter council planning rules, more monitoring of flights, for the Civil Aviation Authority to declare 'special use airspace' over the island, for intervention by the Environment Court - and now for legislative change.
CAA said the airspace application was being looked at.
The islanders have so far failed to plug the many regulatory gaps, and even attempting to was really too big a job for a mere local board, Handley told the MPs.
Helipads have proliferated on Waiheke for use by vineyards, tourism operators and wealthy holiday home owners.
"Most of my neighbours have helipads - only one of them really uses it," Lockhart said.
She said she could see why someone who lives on the North Shore or in Coromandel might want one, but added: "There is no denying that a large noisy machine flying overhead and landing relatively near you has an impact."
They had only just bought the vineyard, when the council told them that while helipad applications were not usually notified to the public, the growing opposition meant their bid lodged by the former owner, would have to be.
This made abandoning the bid easier, and not being able to fly in a few wealthy customers should not impact Obsidian, the vintner said.
Photo: 123RF
The council has till now, considered applications case-by-case - and the threshold to put a helipad on a front lawn has not been high, with little if any building involved.
"There's probably consultants advising, you know, 'get in there while you can' while it's kind of quite easy to get a consent for a helicopter pad," Pippa Coom, a councillor for the Waitematā and Gulf ward, said.
But perhaps not for much longer.
"It's at tipping point," Coom said.
In Auckland city, the Waitematā local board has now asked council planners to ban all recreational helicopter landings and take-offs in urban and suburban residential areas.
This was in part spurred by two high-profile bids to put in helipads at glamorous homes in Herne Bay and Westmere, Waitematā local board member Graeme Gunthorp told RNZ.
The planners have so far been resistant.
They told Waiheke locals last December: "Based on existing consents, complaints and conditions, a review of consents is not warranted at this time."
They said their resources were under pressure from central government demands, so islanders should wait for choppers to be looked at as part of a review of the Auckland Unitary Plan in 2026.
That is not an option, according to Quiet Sky Waiheke's Kim Whitaker.
"Within five years there could be over 100 helipads-stroke-heliports on the island," he warned MPs on Tuesday.
"Even more concerning is there's no official monitoring, regulation or control of any of them."
Izzy Fordham has been "keeping a watchful eye" on this, thinking Aotea may need to unite with Waiheke. She had already asked the council to reverse its position on not notifying helipad applications to the public, but did not get a response, she said.
"Not even in the applications have I been able to find [out] why" people want the helipads, though she suspects they are for the convenience of wealthy holidaying mainlanders.
But the pressure appears to be paying off, with council planners recently agreeing to take a fresh look at the controls and report back at the end of March.
Councillor Coom expects them to move to make helipad consent applications notifiable, and begin giving more weight to concerns about the cumulative impact of so many choppers.
Next, Civil Aviation needed to step up to regulate, and not leave it up to the council, she said.
Handley and Whitaker claim the council does little to check on operators, citing a case where one was flying in three times more a month than allowed (30, instead of 10 flights) as one of the few times the council has intervened.
The council told RNZ that each consent has conditions for recording, monitoring, and reviewing helipad use.