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Introduction and Guidebook Summary 3
Airports of different sizes can then explore, in Chapter 4, the strategies and techniques that
are most appropriate to their size of airport. Chapter 5 reviews applicable literature and provides
case studies of several airports and an university, each of which has encountered difficulties in
communications with surrounding neighborhoods and has sought to change their approach to
that interaction. Chapter 6 provides background material to the airport manager not thor-
oughly versed in the complexities of noise issues to better enable him to respond to public ques-
tioning. Chapters 7 through 9 describe approaches to the abatement mitigation and description
of noise in terms useful to lay communications. The printed document concludes with a list of
the reference material cited throughout the chapters. The accompanying Toolkit includes many
examples of material that has been successfully used to communicate information about noise,
as well as numerous guidance documents about noise and communications that have seldom
been bought together in the same resource. Appendix A, included in the Toolkit, is an anno-
tated bibliography of the many documents, websites, and regulatory guidance used in the devel-
opment of this report.
The Relationship Between Environmental Planning
for Airports and General Community Response Factors
Airports generate environmental impacts in a variety of different categories required to
be reviewed by every environmental assess conducted under the guidelines set forth by the
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (2). Among these are water run-off issues raised
by aircraft de-icing, air quality occasioned by greenhouse gas generation, energy concerns
associated with the amount of fuel burn, and recycling/sustainability issues arising from
large quantities of waste off-loaded from aircraft after each flight and from goods consumed
in the terminal area. However, the environmental effect most commonly associated with air-
ports during the last 60 years has been the noise emissions generated by the aircraft using the
facility.
For more than 40 years, the public has complained about how aircraft noise has impacted
their lives. Through protest, complaint, litigation and political action, they have demanded
that actions be taken to reduce the noise levels over their homes and places of work. The U.S.
Congress instituted a program of systematic noise level reduction by mandating that new aircraft
designs be able to meet maximum noise level limits to be certified for flight.
This process was formally implemented by the FAA through the 14 CFR Part 36 (3) noise
level requirements for three different types of aircraft, dependent on their size and date of
design certification. Subsequently, 14 CFR Part 91 (4) operating requirements for aircraft were
modified to require that all large jets designed before 1976 were to be phased out of the oper-
ating fleet during the mid-1980s if they exceed the least restrictive set of noise level standards.
Subsequently, as a result of congressional approval of the Airport Noise and Capacity Act of
1990 (5), large aircraft were required to conform to the most restrictive standard levels
imposed by Part 36, resulting in the fleet now flown at domestic airports. European and some
Asian airports are evaluating the imposition of even stricter noise level limits to further reduce
noise at the source.
It is important to understand that the public does not complain only about the total amount
of noise to which it is exposed. It also is concerned about the number of flights that pass over,
their individual noise levels, the time of day that they pass over, and their height or proximity to
the viewer on the ground. The DNL metric was adopted by the FAA in 1979 as a result of the Avi-
ation Safety and Noise Abatement Act (6) for environmental documentation. It was developed
