Airport noise modelling for strategic environmental impact assessment of aviation

As projected by different agencies the aviation market will experience a significant increase in air traffic demand over the next decades, driven by the large demand of the Asia-Pacific region. To overcome the further deterioration of the quality of life of communities living around airports, the various aviation stakeholders are required to explore scenarios with different technology options, flight procedures, and fleet replacement strategies. Of course, the assessment of aviation scenarios must be addressed in a more integrated manner than hitherto, where noise, air quality and carbon release are considered. For such purpose, simplified airport noise models are required to overcome the important input data requirements and computation complexity of detailed airport noise models, and also to ensure compatibility against other environmental and economic models. This paper analyses the applicability and discusses the unavoidable limitations and advantages of existing simplified airport noise models within the context of multi-disciplinary strategic environmental impact assessment of aviation. Simplified airport noise models satisfying the above requirements and developed to be coupled with technology evaluators, e.g. Rapid Aviation Noise Evaluator (RANE) model (Torija et al., 2017), can inform policy decisions about which future technology platforms would be likely to be the most environmental efficient when considered holistically. Based on the specific conditions tested, the straight-out trajectory assumption and the use of generic aircraft types seem valid approximations for computing aviation noise outputs.