Developing a Cost-Effective Assessment Method for Noise Impacts at Non-Towered Airports: A Case Study at Purdue University

Abstract

Aircraft noise is considered as one of the environmental impacts that most adversely affects airport development. Aircraft noise estimation tools such as the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) are widely used by airports to mitigate local concerns for airport development. Aircraft operations and fleet mix information play important roles in aircraft performance modeling for noise prediction. However, such information is difficult to obtain at almost 85% of the 3,348 National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS) airports, which lack full-time air traffic control facilities and personnel. Given the increasing percentage of equipped automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) aircraft in the U.S. national airspace, this paper presents a cost-effective noise estimation approach for non-towered general aviation (GA) airports. Instead of deploying physical sound meters or relying on the local air traffic control facilities, the authors collected aircraft positional data and fleet mix information based on ADS-B broadcasts. Advanced aircraft performance model parameters are constructed using four-dimensional aircraft position and a kinematic point-mass model. Aircraft-specific noise levels are interpolated based on the EUROCONTROL Aircraft Noise and Performance (ANP) database. To obtain the final noise level, two adjustments are applied to the interpolated noise values. The test results show the proposed approach can help non-towered airports predict the noise impact on any selected locations near the airport cost-effectively. Recommendations and opportunities for future investigation are also included.

An Experimental and Analytical Approach to Evaluate Transponder-Based Aircraft Noise Monitoring Technology

“…Handling Thrust Values: One of the challenges encountered in our approach pertains to thrust (power setting) values. To address this, we assumed the thrust value as the median between two bounded values derived from the determined aircraft operation mode [41,44]. Moreover, it is essential to note that different aircraft may possess distinct units for thrust (power setting) values.…”

“…The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), a Next-gen communication, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) technology in the United States, plays a pivotal role in this context [34,35]. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in estimating aircraft operations through analyzing ADS-B messages [36][37][38][39][40][41]. Mott [36] demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of ADS-B messages for estimating operations at non-towered airports.…”

“…This technology is subjected to a rigorous evaluation using an experimental and analytical approach. Firstly, we estimate aircraft noise impacts based on a three-stage framework developed by Yang and Mott [41]. Secondly, we employ a physical acoustic sound meter to capture the actual aircraft noise levels, and the corresponding noise events are meticulously documented to serve as a reference for evaluation and validation.…”

Validating ADS-B Data for Use in Noise Modeling Applications

“…However, non-towered airports, which comprise the largest proportion of U.S. airports, do not have access to these pertinent data due to the lack of radar services and tower facilities. As such, the use of ADS-B data collected from low-cost devices has been proposed as a method to collect information necessary to model noise, enabling non-towered airports to leverage noise modeling systems (Yang & Mott, 2022). Huynh et al (2022) have similarly used ADS-B data to model aircraft approach performance to evaluate the benefit of delayed deceleration approaches on aircraft noise impacts, while Gagliardi et al (2017) have used ADS-B data to evaluate the compliance rate and effect of noise abatement procedures.…”