Airport Noise Pollution: This 8-page paper is a general discussion of the problem of airport noise pollution from the perspective of environmental studies. There is a bibliography.
Note to the student from the writer: These articles are all available from the database ProQuest. Your college or university or public library will have it. The Dept. of Commerce article is online.
Airport noise significantly affects millions of people in the United States and around the world. In a great number of instances, aircraft noise simply merges into the urban din, mixing with a cacophony of buses, trucks, motorcycles, cars, and construction noise. However, in locations near airports and plane flight patterns, aircraft noise becomes more of a concern. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss the problem of airport noise pollution from the perspective of environmental studies with special attention to concerns of human response to noise, criteria for land use control, and effects on real estate value.
Airport noise can be dangerous. Airplanes generate as much sound as 150 decibels at takeoff, noise that is 20 decibels louder than a rock concert and 10 decibels louder than a gunshot (Stewart, 2001, p.29). This is a significant amount of noise, a disturbance that dramatically affects people's lives. One research study reveals that children whose schools are near airports score lower on their achievement tests than those who are further away, and when children are moved from an airport noise polluted school to a quieter school, their scores raise (O'Neil, 2002, F6). This was a two-year longitudinal study that tracked a cross section of children and their scores in relation to their proximity to the airports of Munich.
The decibel is the unit used to measure sound. A quiet sound such as the rustling of leaves would be about 20 decibels and a jet liner 500 feet ahead generates about 115 decibels, and according to the U.S. Depa...