F-35 Soundproofing for 58 Homes Pushed to 2027

If you live under the F-35 flight path, your quieter windows just got another year away.

Soundproofing upgrades for 58 homes near the airport — new windows, doors, insulation, the works, at roughly $90,000 to $110,000 per home — were supposed to start in July. Now they won't begin until spring 2027. The feds didn't finalize the grant until well into September, and with nighttime temperatures already in the high 30s, nobody's cutting holes in anyone's walls until the thaw.

The money is real: $7.3 million in federal funds, the largest share of an $18 million Defense Department grant, plus $813,418 of the airport's own money. A dozen more homes got added to the 2027 batch for good measure.

Jet noise is one of those daily-grind issues that shapes whole neighborhoods in Burlington and South Burlington. A full year of delay, at a hundred grand a house in public money, is the kind of thing people talk about at the bus stop.

Spring can't come soon enough — literally.