ABSTRACT
Government policy makers need to balance the needs and rights of residents in close proximity to airports against the need to meet the ever-increasing demand for air travel. The UK Government has based their understanding of community annoyance on primary research conducted in the UK more than thirty years ago. In this paper, we compare more recent quantitative data against the historic data, and suggest that,
using traditional models of aircraft noise annoyance, some adjustments to current noise metrics would seem to be justified in order to better deal with current conditions as they exist today. On the other hand, we have also been investigating alternative qualitative and trading methods of data collection which in many cases have found substantially different results to the current assumed status-quo. The results suggest that standard questionnaires (such as the ISO standard ‘annoyance’ scales) do not always reflect respondent’s underlying attitudes particularly well. In most cases, reported annoyance is not so much determined by the amount of aircraft noise measured using traditional acoustic metrics such as LAeq and Lden, as by a whole range of beliefs and attitudes about the way that the airport operates and engages in meaningful mitigation and compensation programmes.
Keywords: Aircraft Noise, LAeq, Alternative Methods