Impact of AMX-A1 military aircraft operations on the acoustical environment close to a Brazilian airbase

Abstract

Military aircraft operating on airbases usually have a considerable impact on the neighborhood. While the impact of civil aircraft operations can be modeled by commercially available software, the same is hardly possible for military aircraft as no EPNL data are available for such aircraft and flight path are not restricted to those used by civilian operations. Therefore, in this work, the noise impact of AMX-A1 aircraft operating at a Brazilian airbase was evaluated from measurements originally intended for calibration of the noise map of an university that is in the vicinity. From the data, it was possible to obtain LAeq10min with and without jet noise to see how much does AMX operations influence in the total measurement. Sound exposure levels (SEL) were also calculated. It was found that depending of AMX procedure (Approach, Departure, Touch, Go, etc.), jet noise increases the LAeq10min up to 10 dB and SEL values reaches 96, 6 dBA in sensitive areas. It will be discussed if A-weighted sound power level can be estimated form the data considering the aircraft as a point source in free field.