AIRCRAFT NOISE IMPACTS RESEARCH INFORMATION BRIEFS Federal Aviation Administration Office of Environment and Energy

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge Nick Miller of HMMH for his contributions to the FAA Aircraft Noise Impacts Research Roadmap Workshops and preparing this compilation of Information Briefs. We would also like to acknowledge the following people for submitting the Information Briefs. These researchers are subject matter experts on the topics presented and have been involved in the aircraft noise, annoyance, and sleep disturbance fields for many years. We appreciate their time and efforts in this endeavor. key topics for information briefs were identified. The information briefs are one or two pages of text briefly describing the state of practice, state of knowledge, evidence on an important hypothesis, or gaps in the state of knowledge currently not in the roadmap or not discussed at the August and December meetings. The briefs discuss aspects of aircraft noise and its resulting effects on surveyed annoyance, public actions or on sleep disturbance. The papers are not intended as exhaustive treatment of the topics, and not necessarily consistent with one another. They are the views of the identified individual researchers, and are presented unedited. Several researchers contributed briefs, some addressing more than one of the identified aircraft noise effects. We have divided them, or excerpts from them, into the two categories of Annoyance and Sleep, as shown below. Annoyance remains the single most significant effect associated with aviation noise. Community annoyance is the aggregate community response to long-term, steady-state exposure conditions. However, to adequately support government noise policy-making efforts, it is necessary to synthesize the large amount of data contained in journal articles and technical reports to develop a useful exposure-response relationship. In his seminal journal article, Schultz (1978) reviewed data from social surveys concerning the noise of aircraft, street and expressway traffic, and railroads. Going back to the original published data, the various survey noise ratings were translated to Day-Night Average Noise Level (DNL) and, where a choice was needed, an independent judgment was made as to which respondents should be counted as " highly annoyed. " According to Schultz ". .. the basic rule adopted was to count as 'highly annoyed' the people who responded on the upper 27% to 29% of the annoyance scale. .. " (Schultz 1978). For decades, environmental planners have relied heavily on the Schultz Curve for predicting the community annoyance produced by noise from transportation noise sources. Notwithstanding the methodological questions, errors in measurement of both …