Assessing Community Annoyance of Helicopter Noise (2017)

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4 ACRP’s RFP for Project 02-48 cited a general lack of understanding of the relationship between helicopter noise and community response and that in 2004, an FAA Report to Congress, “Nonmilitary Helicopter Urban Noise Study,” recommended that “additional development of models for characterizing the human response to helicopter noise should be pursued.” The solici- tation raised the question of whether the assumed “excess” annoyance of helicopter noise was more usefully attributed to purely acoustic factors, or to nonacoustic factors, or to a combination of the two. This report presents the findings of a social survey on the annoyance of aircraft noise that was intended to seek evidence of the reasonableness of the underlying assumption of the RFP. Chapter 1 reviews the technical literature on the annoyance of helicopter noise to aid in the design of questionnaire items and other aspects of field surveys regarding opinions about the annoyance of helicopter noise. Chapter 2 develops hypotheses for field testing about the annoyance of exposure to helicopter noise. Not all hypotheses were testable at all sites, since individual site characteristics limited types and amounts of helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft noise exposure available for analysis. Chapter 3 discusses criteria used to select survey sites, and identifies sites that satisfied selection criteria. The chapter also describes the questionnaire that was developed, along with the purposes that individual questionnaire items served in testing the hypothesis developed in Chapter 4. Chapter 4 describes noise measurement and social survey methods and implementation. Chapter 5 presents the analysis of survey findings including an interpretation of the results. Chapter 6 provides conclusions and discussion. Appendix A is a short tutorial on the sources and nature of helicopter noise emissions, and an analysis of the correlations among noise metrics commonly used as predictors of community response. Appendix B is an annotated bibliography of relevant studies of the annoyance of helicopter noise, in both laboratory and field settings. It is intended as an interpretive guide to the techni- cal literature on the annoyance of helicopter noise. The annotation focuses on the issue of the “excess” annoyance of rotary-wing aircraft noise, and on examining hypotheses of potential interest for empirical tests in the field study phase of ACRP Project 02-48. Appendix C summarizes a modern approach to accounting for the potential excess annoyance of helicopter noise. The approach concentrates on estimating the net effect of all of the many potential nonacoustic factors on the prevalence of annoyance judgments in communities, rather than identifying individual factors. Appendix D describes the noise measurement protocol for this study. Superscripts in the text refer to Endnotes located at the end of this document. Introduction