Aircraft noise continues to grab media headlines and the attention of politicians around the world continuously reminding airport CEOs that community concerns present one of the biggest threats to the future of their airports. Without careful management, they know that noise concerns have the potential to trigger operating restrictions and frustrate expansion plans.
Noise complaints from individuals and community groups are at the sharp end of the issue with airports often handling large numbers of highly charged calls and emails from concerned neighbors. An emerging trend of airports being flooded with emails and app-based complaints is compounding the challenge with many airports struggling to do much more than meet their commitments to record contacts and provide rudimentary reports about the concerns raised. These two dynamics are often doing more to fuel annoyance than to address it.
The importance of effective management of aircraft noise and the challenges in engaging effectively with the public and complainants are driving new approaches, which are showing exciting results. A rethink on noise complaints is beginning to unlock a deeper understanding that looks likely to play a key role in reducing the threat from aircraft noise concerns through a focus on the central issue of community annoyance. Targeting not just the amount of noise that aviation puts into communities, but also the annoyance that this creates, has the potential to enable the industry to find new ways to better balance the concerns of local residents with the growth necessary to meet the rapidly increasing demand for air travel.
Your Call is Important to Us
For decades, many airports have been committed to operating complaint services, receiving and recording contacts from community members expressing their concerns about the impact of airport operations. What was once focused on telephone calls and hand written letters has migrated online with emails, web forms and now app-based contacts becoming dominant channels.
Back when volumes were manageable, airport staff spent time talking with residents to explain the limitations on the management of air traffic and the limits on being able to deal with the resultant noise. The best of the complaint responses went further by pursuing opportunities for change where this was possible.
In this environment of limited opportunity to improve the level of aircraft noise some residents pursued an approach of trying to make their concerns more prominent by making large numbers of approaches through the complaint channels.
Most airports found that a handful of residents were responsible for the vast majority of contacts and that little short of imposing a night curfew or even closing the airport would satisfy them. Infrequent complainers could often be engaged in more rational dialog exploring what could and could not be done to address their concerns.
Doing More Harm than Good?
Airport staff worked hard to build relationships and understand concerns, but often without complaint handling training and without the data systems and expertise to deliver effective responses. Indeed systems and processes often encouraged unhelpful and unproductive engagement. Complaint handlers were often chosen for aviation expertise and often found themselves hampered by an industry vocabulary of aviation and acoustics terms incomprehensible to most.
Arguments about the facts were not uncommon; whether a particular plane had flown directly over a resident’s home or whether airspace changes had or had not been implemented. It ran counter to building empathy with annoyed residents when they were told that they were not significantly affected by noise because they lived outside the noise contours or that new aircraft were significantly quieter than previous generations, despite increases in the average size and total number of aircraft. Airport staff would be reluctant to give the hard news; that what a resident wanted was not going to happen, instead leaving unrealistic hope alive and feeding annoyance.
Each month airports diligently reported on complaints, counting total contacts received, the number of people complaining and the communities recording the highest numbers of contacts. Some communities would encourage their neighbours to complain and some individuals pursued campaigns, to ensure that they reached the top of each month’s list in the hope that this would give their concerns highest priority. A perfect storm of major airspace changes and internet complaint channels has seen complaint volumes at some airports exceed 1 million annually.
These dynamics have achieved very little, with airports swamped with contacts that tell them very little about the underlying concerns. Many communities remain angry that their complaints were not being acted upon.
There’s More to Annoyance than Just Noise Exposure
These challenges have led an innovative and growing group of thinkers to reconceive airport noise annoyance.
For more than four decades, aviation noise management strategies have been founded on the premise that community annoyance is directly linked to the level of noise exposure. In fact, almost all national aircraft noise legislation can be traced back to the 1978 Schultz study that brought together a wide range of research to describe the relationship between noise exposure and community annoyance.
Schultz Curve – Traditional Thinking on How Noise Drives Annoyance
If the Schultz curve fully explained annoyance, we should have seen substantial reductions in community complaints at airports with shrinking noise contours. At London Heathrow, for example, the number of people exposed to more than a 57dB noise level has fallen by more than 60 percent in the last 20 years, however it is hard to argue that community annoyance has reduced.
If explaining disturbances were this simple we would expect that small flight path changes would cause little change in annoyance. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.
It’s clear that noise exposure is a major contributor to annoyance, but a growing body of experience shows that there are many other factors at play. Importantly, many of these factors are more amenable to constructive action than is the challenge of reducing the noise exposure.
Evolving our Understanding of Annoyance
This partial “decoupling” of community annoyance from noise exposure is leading many progressive aviation noise thinkers to carefully examine other factors at play, a field often named “Non-Acoustic Factors.”
While noise exposure remains an important factor, it is clear that annoyance can be significantly influenced by community perceptions of openness, transparency and fairness; whether stakeholders feel engaged in decision-making processes with their input fairly considered.
Concerns about safety, possible negative health effects and potential impact on children’s education along with property price concerns are often found to be significant contributors to annoyance.
Annoyance – Understanding Each Link in the Chain
As research into annoyance progresses, more focus is being placed on better understanding the wide range of attitudes across the full spectrum of stakeholders. Traditionally, complaint statistics and the opinions of attendees at public meetings would shape the understanding of community attitudes. These voices are important. However, it is becoming clearer that they only provide insight into the attitudes of a small percentage of the stakeholder world and often provide a misleading insight at that.
A Better Approach is Emerging
With this new understanding of annoyance emerging, airports are beginning to rethink their approach to complaint handling. What was once a reluctant but mandatory activity is becoming key to providing insights into attitudes and concerns that can better target action plans to reduce annoyance.
Debates about aviation facts are being replaced with a deep respect for the perceptions of each complainer and a thirst to understand what is driving their annoyance. Increasingly a perceived lack of fairness is emerging as a primary annoyance driver resulting from:
- An actual or perceived change in air traffic management
- Perceived breach of rules, particularly a perceived breach not actioned (penalized) according to perceptions of appropriate penalties
- Unfulfilled expectations about peaceful enjoyment of property or promised improvements in the level of aircraft noise
- A lack of understanding of air traffic management constraints, particularly driven by an assumption that there is a better alternative for sharing or moving the noise
In this environment, engagement with complainants focusses on the five “W” questions:
- Who – to identify individuals and communities that hold particular concerns
- Where – the location of the issue and where the complainant lives
- What event triggered the complaint
- Why did it annoy the complainant with a focus on impact on the complainant rather than the objective character of the intrusion
- What would the complainant like done about it? This should be presented in a form that encourages realistic ideas.
These insights can then be used to identify potential solutions and tangible actions to address annoyance through four key initiatives:
- Optimising flight operations within safety and efficiency constraints to minimise annoyance
- Engaging and educating to help minimise inaccurate perceptions
- Engaging and educating to help set realistic expectations
- Say ‘no’ well when nothing can be done – to ensure that complainers do not have unrealistic hopes that will never be met
These insights can also drive a change in reporting of complaints and responses. The public should have access to a clear picture of the issues that have been raised and responses to those issues. The responses fall into three broad categories:
1. Issues for which a solution has been identified and is being or has been actioned. It is important that the public should be able to monitor progress on solutions being actioned. The community should also to be able identify where partial solutions have been put in place, vital to ensuring that small gains are celebrated and the effort behind them acknowledged.
2. Issues that are under active consideration. The public should have access to a simple process to "sign on" to such issues, to show the extent of community concern. The public should also be able to monitor progress on possible action.
3. Issues that have been raised but for which there is no viable solution. It is important that these issues should be acknowledged. Information on why there is no viable solution should be readily accessible in easily understood terms. The message should be clear: that there is no value in pursuing these issues and that individuals need to accept responsibility for dealing with the consequences of the noise in such cases.
Best practice noise complaint reporting now addresses people and issues, rather than the number of contacts received, removing the incentive to make large numbers of repeat contacts about one issue. In Australia, a change in reporting removed any information about repeat contacts, but instead reported the numbers of individuals who had reported an issue. The result was a drop of 80 percent in the number of contacts received.
Ultimately a Social Negotiation
Ultimately, each society must negotiate its own balance – the point where it decides that the benefits of aviation are in balance with its impacts. To succeed, it is essential that the facts are clear, the debate is informed and that all voices are heard.
Society is well used to the concept of social compacts that accept a level of harm or "dis-benefit" in return for an overall social benefit. Society accepts the costs of the continuing proliferation of private motor vehicles. In return for the pollution, road safety concerns, traffic noise and traffic crowding that it produces, society takes the convenience and freedom of movement that it delivers. In contrast, the aircraft noise debate is often framed in more absolute and less productive terms. Curfews, movement caps, and restrictions on airport expansion take the place of a debate about the appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of expanding aviation.
Improved engagement with complainants is already shifting the mainstream debate in some communities to ensuring an appropriate balance between the efforts that are being made to reduce aircraft noise and the importance of allowing aviation to grow in response to consumer demand and social necessity.
The Future of Complaint Engagement
The industry must strive for a future where legislators and regulators can make better decisions armed with a complete picture of the spectrum of stakeholder opinions, not just those of vocal minorities. Once the complex trade-offs have been weighed up and decisions made it is key that individuals are then in a position to make well-informed lifestyle decisions.
A constructive debate requires a clear picture of community and individual concerns, a complaints system that can deliver this data and engagement strategies that encourage productive communication and good information rather than repeat lodgement of contacts and highly technical explanation of aviation practice and aircraft noise. The debate must address all the drivers of annoyance rather than be limited to technically based data on noise levels and numerically based noise contours.
A new approach to complaints is emerging to help turn these goals into reality.
