How much noise do a million air passengers make? - El Toro Info Site report

To protect the neighbors, Long Beach Airport limits the allowed number of commercial aircraft operations and the aggregate amount of noise they can generate.

Orange County Airport employs a different tactic - a limit on the number of passengers that can be served. This raises questions about whether increasing the number of passengers increases the noise when they fill otherwise empty seats or they fly on newer, quieter aircraft.

For 2003, the MAP negotiated cap at John Wayne Airport was raised from the old limit of 8.4 million annual passengers (MAP) to 10.3 MAP. By the end of calendar year 2003, the airport had served 8,535,130 passengers.

In calendar year 2006 – the latest year for which full passenger and noise data is available - the airport served 9,613,480 passengers. The increase from 2003 was just over one million passengers.

How much additional noise did these million passengers generate?

The answer is in information collected by the airport’s Noise Abatement Program. The report for 2003-04 is archived on this website  and data for 2006 is on the airport’s site 

Each report presents the average noise for a year at the airport’s ten noise monitoring stations. Stations 1S thru 7S are south of the airport around Newport Beach.

The noisiest location, 8N is north of the runway in Irvine. 9N is in Santa Ana and 10N is in Tustin.

The following table shows that the average noise readings (CNEL dB) at the monitoring stations changed very little from 2003 to 2006. Noise at several monitors decreased slightly and no monitor experienced an increase of  one decibel.

Each Noise Abatement Report also includes a contour map graphically showing that the increased passenger volume has not pushed the 65dB noise footprint further south into Newport Beach.

(1) January - December 2003 map is not available on the Internet.

Partial data for 2007 shows a similar pattern of more passengers served but no discernible increase in noise.

It should be no surprise that a million passengers would have so little observable noise impact.

Newport Beach officials predicted this outcome in 2002 prior to the MAP cap being raised. People don’t make noise, planes do.

With airlines able to fill more empty seats, the number of air carrier operations serving the increased number of passengers rose from 83,927 in 2003 to 88,157 in 2006. This increase of 4,230 commercial takeoffs and landings spread over a year’s time computes to fewer than 11 additional operations per day. That is less than one plane in or out each hour that the airport operates. Since half of all operations were takeoffs, generally to the south, and half were landings, generally over the north, any single location on the ground was exposed to half of the flights - one every two hours.

To the folks on the ground, that one flight every two hours might have been an additional annoyance but it meant that the county spared the travelling public a million round trips on the freeways to more distant airports.