Do you ever find yourself walking your dog, driving to work, or lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and then suddenly you hear a loud whirling noise pass you overhead? This noise is considered noise pollution, which we all experience, whether we notice it or not.
Being University of Waterloo aviation students, we usually look up and try to identify what type of plane is flying overhead, but not everyone is a pilot who enjoys the sound of planes flying over their house every night! Specifically, students at the University of Waterloo began to express concerns about this issue, which is why we decided to look at noise pollution on a local level by examining the impacts of noise on communities around the Region of Waterloo International Airport (CYKF) in our geography course with Dr. Grant Gunn.
Through the collaboration of many disciplines and help from multiple faculties, we were able to utilize the skills in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that we had learned over the past few years in the Geography and Aviation program to quantify the impacts of flight operations at our local airport on surrounding communities. For example, consider a WestJet or Flair Airlines Boeing 737 arriving at the airport during nighttime – how loud would this aircraft be for residents trying to get some sleep?
Figure 1. New proposed instrument arrival routes (pink) and existing routes to the right, with the new route avoiding much of the City of Waterloo where the University of Waterloo is located.
Common arrival and departure routes were analyzed for their noise impacts by examining residential areas estimated to be exposed to at least 55 decibels (dB) of noise to those upwards of 85 dB, as this range was discovered to impact human physical and mental health the greatest depending on the altitude of an arriving aircraft. Using government census data, we were able to estimate the number of residents affected by each noise level under individual sections of flight routes and were subsequently able to propose amendments to the arrival routes to reduce the number of people affected by the noise. Figure 1 shows existing and proposed instrument flight rules (IFR) routes used by larger aircraft and jets, and Figure 2 shows visual flight rules (VFR) arrival routes usually used by smaller training aircraft, like the ones we currently fly.
Figure 2. Existing VFR arrival routes (left) over the city of Kitchener-Waterloo, and new proposed routes avoiding the majority of Kitchener (right).
Through the use of GIS, we were able to look at an aspect of aviation sustainability through a different lens, thus opening up another tool that can be beneficial to the aviation sector. We hope the model we developed can be used by airports worldwide to analyze and minimize noise pollution in their local communities.