Assessment of land use compatibility and noise pollution at Imam Khomeini International Airport

This study aimed to investigate land use planning around airports, by employing Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in conjunction with an optimization algorithm using an Integrated Noise Model (INM) software, to establish the potential effects of aircraft noise at Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) in Tehran. We also checked for land use compatibility with the noise levels around IKIA and the residents' reaction to the noise. The research was carried out in three stages: a) the establishment of Strategic Noise Map (SNM) scenarios of the airport operation in the years 2011, 2020 and 2030 using the INM software; b) the assessment of the results with emphasis on the study area land uses and application of RS and GIS and the exposure of residents at different levels of environmental noise; and c) the assessment of the intensity of aircraft noise annoyance at various times of day and night. The results indicated that developing IKIA together with the residential development will increase airport noise. Hence proper management and control of noise at IKIA is essential.     

The cost of aircraft noise – Does it differ from road noise? A meta-analysis

This paper aims at studying the difference in cost between aircraft noise and road noise using meta-analysis. 90 NDI estimates have been gathered from the literature (a total of 53 studies), out of which 44 are estimates for aircraft noise and 46 are for road noise. The results of the meta-regression suggest that aircraft noise costs somewhere in the range of 0.40 and 0.60 percent more per increased dB than road noise. Knowing the associations between these costs of noise pollution can be a convenient tool for planners and policy makers, offering an opportunity to make predictions of aircraft noise when only estimates of road noise are available, and vice versa.     

Complaints caused by aircraft operations: an assessment of annoyance by noise level and time of day

The impact of aircraft movements on the local community surrounding an international airport was investigated using airport data on complaints, noise monitoring, aircraft flight paths and movements to assess annoyance due to noise level and time-of-day. As predicted, the louder the noise the more complaints were generated, with twice the complaints per movement at 110–114 PNdB compared with 74–79 PNdB.The hourly patterns in flight frequency and complaints were clearly distinct. Calculations of the complaints per aircraft movement for each hour of the day showed a striking 24 h pattern with night flights (23.00–06.00) causing on average nearly five times more complaints than the rest of the day (06.00–23.00). The time of the greatest propensity to complain about aircraft noise was between 01.00 and 02.00 and the lowest between 08.00 and 09.00.The circadian pattern in sensitivity to aircraft noise could be used to inform the development of airport operations and flight movements to minimize community disturbance.     

Comparison of public perception and risk management decisions of aircraft noise near Taoyuan and Kaohsiung International Airports

This study uses multiple linear regression to identify factors contributing to perceived risk among residents near Taoyuan and Kaohsiung International Airports, the effect of perceived risk on their willingness to reduce risk, and consumption preferences that can reduce risk. Results indicated that residents' risk perception near Taoyuan Airport is lower than that near Kaohsiung Airport. Noise pollution experience, perceived probability of environmental contamination and negative effects, and perceived severity of catastrophic consequences significantly increase residents' perceived risks. Residents are willing to recognize and participate in mitigating the risks of aircraft noise pollution. The more risk residents perceive, the more willing they are to participate in disaster reduction and investigate means of improving the risk environment.     

Aircraft noise exposure and resident's stress and hypertension: A public health perspective for airport environmental management

Noise management regulations and policies at commercial airports are reviewed. A cross-sectional study of environmental noise and community health based, on the SF-36, was conducted in residential neighborhoods near Sydney Airport with high exposure to aircraft noise and in a matched control suburb unaffected by aircraft noise. Noise measurements were analysed and a novel noise metric formulated based on background environmental noise levels. After controlling for confounders, subjects who have been chronically exposed to high aircraft noise level are more likely to report stress and hypertension compared with those not exposed to aircraft noise. Policy implications and further research are described.     

Disaggregate spatio-temporal assessments of population exposure to aircraft noise

Estimates of exposure to aircraft noise are generally based on an average day of operations and residential population figures. While providing a convenient way to condense information, this does not reflect noise experiences across the day. This paper details an approach to inject more reality into exposure assessments, using disaggregate geographic information systems-based flight movement data and a procedure to track the population over the day. Using empirical evidence from Sydney, this leads to markedly different insights about noise impacts, which in turn has ramifications for policy-makers planning flight operations and residential settlement patterns in impacted areas.     

Aircraft routing for on-demand air transportation with service upgrade and maintenance events: Compact model and case study

This paper addresses a problem faced by airline companies that offer on-demand flight services. Given a list of flight requests, the company has to assign its aircraft to these requests while minimizing operational costs. The main issue in this planning process involves the positioning of aircraft when they are not available at the airports of customer departure. The cost of this positioning should be as low as possible, as the customers’ expenditures are proportional to the requested flight hours only. We propose a compact optimization model to support decision making in this situation. It takes into account the mandatory aircraft maintenance events and the possibility of flight upgrades according to the their impact on the operational costs. One important and novel feature of this model is that it allows the anticipation or postponement of the beginning of flights and maintenance events within a given tolerance, giving more freedom to the decision making process. This research is motivated by a case study carried out with a fractional management airline company that operates in European and Asian countries. Computational experiments using real-life data collected from the company show that the proposed model can be solved quickly using general-purpose optimization software, including open-source alternatives. The results indicate that the obtained solutions lead to significant reductions in the operational costs and hence can be used in practice for effective decision making.     

Analysis of airport noise through LAeq noise metrics

The methodology used in several countries for airport noise simulations, including Brazil, is based on Day-Night Sound Pressure Level (DNL) metric. However, DNL metrics can in some cases bring distortions for sound levels, daily and nightly. The purpose of this study is to make an analysis of airport noise through the L_Aeq metric and propose new alternatives based on Day Equivalent Sound Level (L_AeqD) and Night Equivalent Sound Level (L_AeqN) noise metrics. We also apply the concept of acoustic influence areas for the analysis.     

Environmental capacity: noise pollution at Catania-Fontanarossa international airport

Airport capacity has widely been used as a measure of the level of performance of airport infrastructure. In the last decade or so, a new way of interpreting capacity has established itself that includes environmental compatibility, especially in terms of noise nuisance. This study initially offers an analysis of the environmental compatibility of Catania-Fontanarossa airport and then generalizes the methodology. The analysis was carried out with the aid of the integrated noise model (INM) software. This makes it possible to formalize the relationship between the four principal factors determining aircraft noise nuisance: level of noise, fleet composition, number of operations per day and affected surface. It allows the construction of abacuses showing the trend of each of the four factors, as the others vary. These abacuses can help in airport planning and management by providing a simple and quick way to handle environmental concerns especially for computing environmentally based landing/takeoff fares imposed on aircraft.     

Determinants of public reactions to Concorde test flights at the John F. Kennedy International Airport

Detailed noise measurements from early Concorde test flights together with community characteristics data from the US Census Bureau were used to explain monthly complaint patterns arising from neighborhoods surrounding the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Consistent with an earlier study, the number of complaints per aircraft movement positively varied with average loudness of the flights. Complaints were more common during the summer months. Additional neighborhood characteristics also determined the frequency of Concorde-specific complaints; e.g. communities with longer median homeowner tenure were more likely to be prolific complainers, all else being equal.     

When environmental indicators are not neutral: Assessing aircraft noise assessment in Europe

This paper brings the lessons of critical thinking of environmental indicators to transport studies. To demonstrate the extent to which these indicators are not neutral, the case study focuses on airport noise indicators imposed by both the European Union and Flanders, Belgium, as they are applied to Brussels Airport's operations. Three directions have been considered. First, we unveil the spatial mismatch between protests and official noise contours that are supposed to reflect overall annoyanceand sleep disturbance. Then we highlight the high sensitivity of the mandatory noise indicators (L_den, L_night and dose-effect function) to both their definition and the thresholds considered. Second, we review the legislative process at the time the EU and Flanders adopted their regulation on noise assessment. It appears both the nature of the indicators and thresholds have been the subject of debate by EU Ministers and MPs, while Flanders has imposed a dose-effect function that is arguably outdated and unusable in specific cases. Finally, we discuss the results through the lens of the authoritative power of official noise indicators and related maps, which many journalists and scholars take for granted. All this contributes to the construction of distorted knowledge of noise issues and calls for a re-evaluation of the EU's and Flanders' noise indicators.     

A systematic approach to assess the effectiveness of airport noise mitigation strategies

Regional airports are often located very close to the urban area they serve and the increasing traffic rate that many of them have experienced in the last years has produced several impacts on the communities living close to the airport area, mainly aviation noise. If not properly managed, noise impacts produced by airport operations can cut down significantly the development of airport air traffic with direct effects on the economic and territorial systems. Aeronautical noise has greatly reduced in the last decade, due to aircraft design technological improvements and more severe regulations. However, the noise reduction during a single event does not make the issue of the airport location – and then the whole noise impact – less significant. This paper proposes an assessment process to evaluate the effects of actions adopted to reduce airport noise impacts on populated areas. Both airport-related factors – such as number of take-off; day-evening-night distributions of movements; aircraft type; flying paths – and land-use characteristics have been considered and combined in a density index that synthesizes the impacts of airport noise on the territory. The assessment process has been tested on a real case, the airport of Bologna in Northern Italy. The predicted results, compared with available real data for the test case, are significant and encourage the use of the proposed assessment process as decision support system for the airport management.     

Incorporating annoyance in airport environmental policy: noise, societal response and community participation

Airport capacity continues to be one of the air transport issues that creates the most concern. The major environmental constraint for airports is the noise generated by aircraft. Annoyed communities living around airports have become a limiting factor for airport capacity and operability. This paper brings together the existing literature in the fields of airport environmental capacity, non-acoustic factors of noise annoyance, NIMBYism and environmental conflicts. We also analyze the socio-environmental conflict between Barcelona airport and the community of Gavà Mar. This case shows that the lack of trust between parties, the impossibility of predicting noise exposure, the absence of opportunities for civil society to speak and the difficulty of accessing relevant information foster annoyance and mobilization in the communities that live around the airport. In addition, it is shown that, in such a situation, communities’ reactions can evolve to a post-NIMBY stage in which proactive attitudes replace reactive ones.     

Indian and American consumer perceptions of cockpit configuration policy

Prior studies have examined the passenger's trust in a human operated system versus an autonomous autopilot operated system. The results indicated that passengers had a more negative attitude toward the autopilot systems. The current study expands on this by examining perceptions of different cockpit configurations, and exploring cultural differences between Indian and American individuals. Participants from both India and the United States were asked to imagine a) that they were on a commercial flight, b) that they were sending a package on a cargo flight, or c) that they were on a corporate flight. In addition they were told that the aircraft was piloted by: a) two pilots in the cockpit, b) one pilot in the cockpit and one pilot located in a ground facility using remote controls, or c) two pilots in a ground facility using the remote controls. The results demonstrated that participants were strongly against having two pilots on the ground controlling the aircraft with remote controls, although most accepted this if the pilots were remote controlling cargo flights. In addition, American participants had more extreme views than the Indian participants, except with the cargo situation.     

Identifying flight fatigue factors: An econometric modeling approach

The paper looks at responses of crewmembers of six Taiwan air carriers who were asked to report their levels of fatigue before takeoff and after landing. Ordinal probit models are employed to estimate three fatigue models for different flight operations and serve as vehicles to investigate flight fatigue factors and identify their relative significance. The top three factors for long haul flights are found to be sleep quality at home, sleep quality on aircraft and “nod-off “experiences; for regional flights, age, extra non-flying tasks on the ground, and experiences of fatigue during flight operations are important; and for domestic flights poor cockpit environment, age, and experiences of fatigue during flight operations are relevant.     

Airline strategies for aircraft size and airline frequency with changing demand and competition: A simultaneous-equations approach for traffic on the north Atlantic

Airport planners need to know the forecast demand on the facilities provided airside at airports. For this they need to know how airlines will deal with traffic in terms of the size of aircraft and frequency of service. In response to increasing demand, airlines may increase capacity by increasing the frequency of flights or they may choose to increase aircraft size. This may yield operating cost economies. If the airports they operate from are capacity constrained they will be limited in the extent that they can change frequency that will limit their ability to compete with the number of frequencies offered. Consequently, these airports are excluded as are major hubs as frequencies will be influenced by connecting passengers. Routes are identified on the north Atlantic that can be analysed and conclusions are suggested on the basis of three stage least-squares estimates for pooled time series-cross section data. An increase in passengers on the whole will result in a larger increase in frequency than in aircraft size but the impact of competition does not yield significant results due to the strategy of excluding certain categories of airport.     

Probabilistic assessment of fleet-level noise impacts of projected technology improvements

Demand projections for civil aviation have forecast increases in operations in future decades. Increases in demand are beneficial to the growth and advancement of the aviation industry, but also come with the threat of significant increase in environmental impacts. In response, the industry is focusing on programs to develop technologies for reductions in fuel burn, NO_x emissions, and noise. While aircraft-level impacts are an obvious metric of success, it is difficult to make informed robust technology investment decisions with respect to noise without understanding the fleet-level impacts. Fleet-level predictions of noise for technology explorations are especially complicated because it is computationally expensive, highly combinatorial, and airport-specific. Recently, rapid automated airport noise models have been developed, which can be simulated using Design of Experiments (DOE). The results of these simulations are used to generate surrogate models for airport noise contour area, which can be summed to yield a fleet-level impact. These models make use of simplifying assumptions to provide estimates of airport-level noise that are substantially cheaper to compute. They can be used to perform parametric trade-off analyses in conjunction with the equivalency assumption. Equivalency asserts that environmental impacts of a technology infused aircraft can be represented by scaled operations of the baseline aircraft in the same class. This simple assumption allows for the modeling of technology and market penetration factors under the same units: operations. This research uses surrogate models in conjunction with the equivalency assumption to examine two potential technology scenarios in a target forecast year, simulating technology and market performance factors to identify vehicle classes that could have the greatest impact in reducing contour area. Results show that technology and market performance of future notional Small Single Aisle and Large Single Aisle vehicle aircraft have the highest positive correlations with potential reductions in contour area.     

Grounded aircraft: An airfield operations perspective of the challenges of resuming flights post COVID

The global COVID pandemic, national lockdowns and unprecedented decline in passenger demand worldwide has led to airlines cancelling services, furloughing staff, applying for financial support and placing aircraft into temporary storage. However, with finite space available, and up to two-thirds of the world's total passenger fleet grounded for an indeterminate period of time, airlines have been forced to park their aircraft in unusual places, sometimes at airports they do not normally serve and in volumes never normally experienced. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent of grounded aircraft at UK airports and explore the challenges, from an airfield operations perspective, of resuming flights post-COVID.     

A community evaluation of Essential Air Services

Because the Essential Air Service (EAS) is a controversial federal program, a debate regarding its rehabilitation options and even its complete termination has been on the political agenda for more than a decade. For the beneficiaries of the program, most notably communities receiving subsidized air services and regional airlines supplying these services, EAS flights increase the accessibility of small and remote communities. For those people defending low government expenditures and free markets, EAS flights are a typical example of public intervention and wasteful government spending. In addition, increasing federal appropriations, rising per passenger subsidies, and the growing number of communities asking for subsidized air services have generated public attention, resulting in calls for improvements to enhance the efficiency of the program. Using Web-based survey data gathered from a pool of 95 city officials representing 56 EAS communities, this study aimed at contributing to the debate by attempting to provide evidence regarding how EAS communities perceived the importance of EAS flights to their communities, how they evaluated the then-current state of EAS flights, how they locally supported EAS flights, and how they assessed the possible rehabilitation options. The results of the survey revealed that EAS communities (1) assigned a high importance to EAS flights but not as high an importance to creating more jobs, improving the quality of education, and improving the quality of health services; (2) believed that the frequency of the flights was at the right level and that the airfares were expensive; (3) undertook marketing efforts to increase awareness of the flights, to attract air carriers to their communities, and to implement market studies for determining the potential of the flights; and (4) did not believe that rehabilitation options, such as employing alternative transportation modes, using smaller aircrafts, and consolidating EAS flights, would work, but they supported awarding longer-term EAS contracts.     

The loyalty process of residents and tourists in the festival context

Few attempts have been made to find out if the loyalty process for residents and tourists in the context of cultural festivals is the same. This study investigated the influence of involvement on satisfaction as factors contributing to the likelihood of returning to an annual festival for residents and tourists. A sample of 412 attendees of a cultural and historic festival in the Midwest region of the USA was surveyed. The results showed that both residents and tourists who were more involved with the festival had higher satisfaction levels. However, only residents who were highly satisfied with the festival were more likely to attend again, whereas tourists' satisfaction level did not significantly influence their likelihood of returning. For tourists, it is likely that their quest for novelty is influential in shaping their future intentions. Implications of this result for the sustainability of cultural festivals are discussed.