At an August 2023 county meeting on Gabreski Airport, a Westhampton homeowner named Karen Avrick described the exact moment that had brought her out that night. She had woken up at 5:55 a.m. to a boom directly overhead. She asked the board a question nobody could answer: should she move?
Three years later, the airport she was talking about just broke ground on a new control tower. That groundbreaking came in the same summer as a ribbon cutting on a new hangar, a new charter operator signing a 30 year lease, and a separate multimillion dollar terminal expansion working toward completion. If you live in Westhampton and it feels like this year sounded different, that is not a coincidence. It is the result of roughly $68 million in combined construction landing in the same stretch of months as some of the heaviest flight volume the airport has recorded.
A Groundbreaking, a Ribbon Cutting, and a New Tenant
On August 12, 2026, Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine and Congressman Nick LaLota stood at Gabreski to unveil a $20 million air traffic control tower, replacing a structure built in 1943 when the field was purely a military installation. The new tower will stand nearly twice as tall as the old one, at 146 feet, and LaLota secured $11 million in federal funding to help pay for it.
That tower groundbreaking runs alongside a separate, larger project working toward completion this year: a $48 million expansion led by Orlando-based Signature Aviation, converting 13 acres of vacant airport land into two new hangars, a 5,600-square-foot terminal, a new aircraft parking ramp and a fueling station. Signature's own environmental assessment projects that annual takeoffs and landings could grow from about 50,000 in 2023 to 75,000 by 2043 with the expansion in place, compared to roughly 65,000 without it.
The tenant list at Gabreski also grew this summer. Modern Aviation held a ribbon cutting on June 25, 2026, for a newly built hangar with 30,475 square feet of heated space and a renovated terminal. Around the same time, Hopscotch Air announced it was opening a new base at the airport, leasing hangar space from Northside Hangars under a 30-year agreement with the county. Four separate announcements, one runway system, one summer.
The Traffic Number Behind the Construction
None of this construction is speculative. County officials point to a specific data point from earlier this year: during the 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Gabreski saw a 91 percent jump in flights compared to the 2018 Open, reaching 1,983 flights over the tournament window. Romaine has called the airport's broader footprint an economic engine, citing figures of 44,000 to 60,000 aircraft operations a year and an estimated $116.1 million in regional economic impact.
Put those numbers together and the construction reads less like an upgrade and more like a bet. The county is not building a bigger airport because this year was unusual. It is building a bigger airport because this year is expected to become the new normal, and the infrastructure needs to catch up to demand that has already arrived.
The Complaint System That Traveled to Another Town
The most interesting number from this year did not come from Gabreski's own press materials. It came from Riverhead, roughly twenty miles away, where officials revived a long-dormant helicopter noise task force in July 2026 because low-flying aircraft crossing Wading River had become a daily irritant. At that meeting, Councilwoman Denise Merrifield told the room that Gabreski officials had reported approximately 7,000 aircraft-noise complaints over the previous year.
That figure did not stay in Westhampton. It became the evidence another town used to argue for changing FAA flight corridors. Terese McKaskie of the Southold Town Aircraft Noise Committee described the underlying pattern as a "whack-a-mole situation," with air traffic sliding from one community to the next as each one pushes back. Riverhead's task force chair, John Cullen, put it more plainly, saying frustration compounds with each pass overhead.
This is the part of the story that rarely gets told alongside the ribbon cuttings: the same complaint infrastructure built to give Westhampton residents a voice, primarily the AirNoise reporting app that lets anyone log a flyover with a tap, has become a dataset that other towns now cite in their own defense. Westhampton's noise problem is no longer just a local nuisance. It is a regional data point.
What the People Living Under It Actually Say
Sharon Frost, a Westhampton Beach resident who sits on the county's Gabreski Airport Community Advisory and Review Board, put it plainly when the expansion was first announced: there was a week that summer where she logged a complaint through the app 75 times, and even with her doors closed she could still hear the planes.
"Sunday morning, I woke up at 5:55 AM with a boom over my head."
That was Karen Avrick's account from the 2023 meeting, and residents who have followed the issue for a decade will tell you the specifics have shifted over the years but the shape of the complaint has not: private jets, not the military traffic from the 106th Rescue Wing, are the recurring source of frustration. Neighbors have consistently said they are not trying to shut the airport down or restrict the National Guard's rescue operations. What they want is for corporate flight operators to actually use the northerly approach to Runway 24 that the county's 1990 "Fly Neighborly" policy calls for, instead of the southern approach over Runway 6 that sends traffic straight over residential streets like Baycrest Avenue.
The One Seat That Keeps Coming Up Empty
There is a governance detail from that same 2023 meeting worth knowing if you plan to follow this issue going forward. One resident pointed out that the advisory board once had a seat reserved for someone who was, in her words, just a homeowner with no other stake in the airport. That seat had gone unfilled after the previous occupant moved to Remsenburg, worn down by the noise. Legislator Bridget Fleming noted the board does have a Westhampton Citizens Advisory Committee chair present, but the exchange captured something real about how these conversations work. The people most affected by flight patterns are often the ones with the least formal say in setting them.
If you want to track what happens next, the Gabreski Airport Community Advisory and Review Board meets periodically at the county level, and Suffolk County maintains a public page on the airport's operations and noise abatement program. The AirNoise app remains the fastest way to log a complaint if a flight path passes over your house late at night or early in the morning, and those numbers, as Riverhead just demonstrated, do travel further than you might expect.
What This Summer Actually Tells You
Add it up and the honest read on 2026 is this: Gabreski is not quietly managing a noise problem while it waits for things to calm down. It is expanding to handle more of exactly the traffic that generates the complaints, with county officials framing the growth as an economic win even as the same year produced enough complaint volume to become a talking point in a different town's public meeting. Both things are true at once, and neither is going away before the next construction phase wraps.
For anyone who has lived in Westhampton through a few of these summers, none of this will feel like news exactly. What might be new is seeing the dollar figures, the flight counts and the complaint totals laid out together, because that is usually where the actual pattern becomes visible.
If you are weighing a move in this part of the South Shore or the East End and want a straight read on what a specific street or neighborhood actually feels like day to day, not just what the listing photos show, Samantha Bisagni has spent years working these communities and is always happy to talk through what she's seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.
