Airport Industry needs ‘real world’ experiences with noise if expansion is to continue

Dani Fuimicelli
27 July 2015

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Sticking to old fashion techniques for assessing the noise impacts of aircraft on local communities will only hold back public acceptance of vital airport development, says Temple Group's Dani Fiumicelli.

The airport commission is due to deliver its recommendations on airport expansion soon. Environmental issues have featured prominently in the appraisal process and noise has been a headline topic. In the past 30 years aircrafts have become much less noisy, but individual aircrafts are not yet “quiet”. This means that even although individual aircraft noise foot prints and airport overall noise envelopes may have shrunk or at worst remained static as less noisy aircraft entered the fleet mix; each flight can still be perceived as noisy to some people on the ground. 

For decades noise contours based on averaging noise metrics have been the only information used to assess aviation noise impacts. There is now official recognition that people do not experience aircraft noise in an averaged fashion; and in addition to energy averaged noise contours, information including the numbers of flights, the peak noise levels of each flight and the distribution of aircraft along flight paths to and from an airport are also important when describing airport noise impacts.

"The noise challenges facing the airport industry as it seeks to expand include recognising that the intensity and distribution of its noise impacts are complex and vary with how an airport operates"

Developing noise contours involves making assumptions about the aircraft flight characteristics and airport operating factors influencing noise production, with typically an average of these factors over the summer period being used in the UK. This means that the resulting noise contour information is a hypothetical fusion of all the potential airport operating scenarios, rather than an estimate of the actual noise conditions under specific circumstances.

This can mean some people are exposed to noise levels above thresholds for adverse effects and for noise insulation or compensation for substantial periods of time; but they are not be recognised as significantly affected or qualifying for the offer of mitigation as they are outside the “averaged” noise contours.

The noise challenges facing the airport industry as it seeks to expand include recognising that the intensity and distribution of its noise impacts are complex and vary with how an airport operates; that assessing and communicating its noise impacts in ways that reflect the real world experience of affected communities is critical; and that, excluding from mitigation those who suffer real noise impacts on the basis of hypothetical averaging of how an airport operates is unbalanced.

Overcoming these challenges will not be simple; but doing so is likely lead to greater acceptance of the noise that airports will inevitably generate and less resistance to change as airports seek to adapt how they operate.

Dani Fiumicelli.is technical director,(acoustics) at Temple Group