Airport noise assessment and mitigation: A simple and flexible methodology

Abstract

Airport noise assessment and mitigation have been recognized as major challenges in the current civil aviation context. This paper aims to provide a general, simple, and flexible methodology to approximate airport noise-influenced zones and quantify the social cost of noise pollution. The proposed methodology performs this assessment without the need for specific software, monitoring stations, and sophisticated data. Airport noise-influenced zones are estimated by relying on publicly available aircraft certification data, while the social cost of such estimation is computed by taking into account the distribution of residential units located within zones affected by noise. We present an application of this method to a group of Italian and Spanish airports, as well as possible beneficial policy interventions in terms of minimization of noise impact on the population living in the airport neighborhoods. In addition, possible mitigation policies are presented in the form of noise surcharges applied to different aircraft categories.