Federal Aviation Administration

Metrics to evaluate the impact of aircraft noise

Although the number of people exposed to significant aircraft noise levels in the U.S. was reduced by about 90% between 1975 and 2005, airport noise restrictions and public complaints continue to grow.  In fact, while U.S. Federal investment in local noise mitigation has increased five fold, at the same time airport noise restrictions have grown ten fold.  These statistics suggest a need for data to determine if we are using the right metrics to assess the impact of aircraft noise.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are pursuing research under the Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction (PARTNER) Center of Excellence to assess existing aircraft and airport noise metrics and to evaluate potential new metrics to assess the impact of airport and other noise sources on a community and to understand the relationship between noise annoyance, physiological responses, cognitive performance, and sleep quality.  The project will involve laboratory experiments and social surveys to evaluate human response to aircraft noise.

This research may result in a set of recommended acceptance metrics and threshold criteria that must be subjected to peer-review as the findings are expected to be of high public interest, and potentially lead to regulatory action and technology development that could exceed the $500 million per year threshold definition for highly influential scientific disseminations. 

A work product on low frequency noise should be available to initiate the peer review process in FY 2007.   Additional products on other metrics may be available for peer review in FY 2008-2009.

Highly influential scientific information

Influential scientific information

The Peer Review Plan is still being developed.  The preliminary plan includes the following elements:

(1) The peer review would occur in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2007.

(2) This review would most likely be conducted by individual letters.  The PARTNER Center of Excellence, which operates independently of the FAA, will be charged with facilitating the peer review.

(3) Public comment is extremely important for this work product.  The details of the plans for public comments are being refined.  There will be opportunities for public comment on the work product through symposia and public meetings. 

(4) All public comments will be made available to the peer reviewers

(5) We expect to have more than 10 peer reviewers.

(6) The peer reviewers should have expertise including, but not limited to, psychoacoustics, aircraft design, noise measurements, noise regulations, noise metrics and annoyance models, sleep disturbance, noise impact on learning, the mechanics of flight, atmospheric effects on noise propagation, and statistics.

(7) The plan for selecting the peer reviewers is still under development.  Reviewers will be designated by an outside organization (most likely PARTNER in collaboration with its Advisory Board).

(8) The plan to nominate peer reviewers is still being developed. Scientific and professional societies and the public could be asked to nominate peer reviewers.

Dr. Lourdes Maurice

E-mail:

Lourdes.Maurice@faa.gov

Phone:

(202) 493-4293