Minimum Requirements for Noise Modelling Consultation

Overview

COVID-19: As a consequence of the severity of the current COVID-19 outbreak and its impact on the aviation industry, the CAA has decided to pause this consultation process for six months. 

In order to carry out certain of its regulatory duties, the CAA requires stakeholders (usually from airports) to provide us with outputs from noise modelling. Such outputs are typically in the form of sets of ‘noise contours’, along with the area they cover and/or the number of residents living within them. Currently, different stakeholders use different levels of sophistication in this modelling, which is as expected since they have different numbers of residents affected by aviation noise, and may respond to the CAA in regard to different of our duties. Up until now, it has been the responsibility of each stakeholder to decide on the level of sophistication of noise modelling appropriate for its circumstances.

The CAA now believes that it is appropriate to specify the minimum acceptable level of sophistication of noise modelling required for us to carry out our duties, to provide clarity to sponsors and stakeholders about the methodology they should use and therefore reduce ambiguity, and to provide consistency across different groups of airports.  In general, the CAA will expect the noise analysis to be sufficient for it to carry out its duties but also proportionate to the size and likely noise effects of the airport or the proposal under consideration.  In most circumstances, some form of noise analysis will be presented to the CAA.  However, we appreciate that installation of noise monitoring infrastructure and modelling of results informed by noise monitoring and track data can involve some expenditure, and in some cases, this level of expense would not be proportionate.

The CAA has published a document where it defines Categories of noise modelling and puts forward its proposals for the minimum requirements which different stakeholder and sponsor groups should achieve in order for the CAA to carry out its duties. We invite comments on our proposals and will consider any response we receive before publishing our final requirements.

How to respond to this consultation

Please let us have your comments by following the "Give us your views" link below.

If you are not able to use the online consultation and wish to send a self-contained response we ask that your comments are structured around our questions. Otherwise we will not be able to analyse the submissions in the same way that we analyse the online responses.

This consultation closes on 4 March 2020. 

If you would like to discuss anything about how to respond to the consultation, please email noise@caa.co.uk.