Airport staff outline operational effects of continuous Mar-a-Lago flight restriction at PBI

Chair Nancy Pullum opened the Citizens Committee on Airport Noise meeting and turned the floor to Laura Beebe, director of the Palm Beach County Department of Airports, and Senior Deputy Director Gary Saipak for a briefing on a newly published temporary flight restriction (TFR) affecting the Mar-a-Lago area.

"Palm Beach County, as the owner and operator of the Palm Beach International Airport, has no jurisdiction whatsoever to regulate aircraft in flight," Beebe said, adding that the FAA has exclusive authority over navigable airspace and that the Secret Service requests specific security requirements that the FAA then issues as a NOTAM. She said an FAA air traffic control manager was willing to attend but was prevented from coming by a government shutdown.

Saipak displayed the FAA NOTAM for the Mar-a-Lago restriction and said the published protection typically uses two rings: a 10-nautical-mile inner ring and a 30-nautical-mile outer ring, each with different constraints on aircraft operations. "All air carrier or all aircraft operations are prohibited in the inner ring except for certain military aircraft, law enforcement, air ambulance, ... regularly scheduled commercial service aircraft ... cargo operators, and any aircraft that travel through gateway airports," Saipak said. He added that scheduled commercial and cargo operators are permitted in part because those flights operate under TSA-approved security plans.

Saipak described operational consequences at PBI: departures that previously flew straight out over Mar-a-Lago are now assigned northbound headings from Runway 10L, and arrivals that formerly came "straight in" over the estate must use published approaches that keep aircraft outside the 1-nautical-mile surface-to-2,000-foot radius. He said the FAA had temporarily prevented southbound departures from Runway 10R, pushing many small aircraft onto the north runway; two days before the meeting, the FAA allowed some 10R departures with an assigned heading of 160 or direct to Lantana.

The airport presented snapshots of operations on selected dates: a non-TFR day (03/26/2025) showed about 630 total operations, while a president-in-residence day (03/29/2025) dropped to about 338 operations. Saipak warned that general aviation operations typically fall during TFR periods because of screening requirements and routing constraints, and that the airport sees clusters of flights immediately before and after the TFR window.

Beebe and Saipak named the gateway airports used for inbound GA screening (Orlando International, Fort Lauderdale International, Westchester County, Teterboro and Washington Dulles) and said the county will post the presentation and contact information for the airport noise comment line on the committee's web page. Beebe also noted that the county airport system is self-supporting and does not rely on local tax dollars for operations.

What happens next: airport staff said they will share the presentation materials online, and committee members and county elected officials said they will pursue follow-up discussions with federal agencies and improve local noise monitoring and technical analysis.

"I'll turn it back over to you, madam chair," Saipak said at the end of his presentation before public comment began.