This Saturday, airport noise opponents will host a rally from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Lake Harriet Band Shell celebrating National No Fly Day.

MSP FairSkies Coalition spokesman Kevin Terrell says the rally will celebrate a "recent victory" in slowing the Metropolitan Airports Commission's adoption of a long-term plan for the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport until next February that anticipates dramatic growth in airport traffic by 2035. The MAC decided to hold off until it has more runway data from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The rally is sponsored by the coalition and the South Metro Airport Action Council, citizens' groups that have battled airplane noise from MSP for years. It will feature Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, and others as speakers. Part of a national campaign, it will dovetail with rallies in other cities — Boston, Phoenix, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Calif., Los Angeles and San Diego — that are also noise-challenged.

In San Diego, residents have protested changes in airplane flight paths near the San Diego International Airport. A recent TV report showed a raucous, distinctly un-Californian crowd of maybe 800 people skewering stone-faced FAA officials at a hearing about the plan.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, DFL-Washington, called for congressional hearings to explore how airplane noise affects residential communities in the nation's capital — and beyond.

Norton says some airplane noise is caused by new flight paths that are part of the FAA's Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), which uses satellites instead of radar to guide air traffic.

"The airplane noise our residents experience is not unique and has become a national issue," she said.

The idea for a rally in Minneapolis came after Terrell spoke at a citizens' meeting last summer in Santa Cruz, which has been affected by noisy new aircraft arrival pathways at the San Francisco International Airport. "They're pretty fired up," he said.

Janet Moore • 612-673-7752 Twitter: @MooreStrib