Application of noise abatement procedures at regional airports

The increasing traffic rate experienced by regional airports in Europe in recent years has had various impacts on the communities living near to the airport areas. To mitigate the negative effects of aviation noise, airports, particularly those close to dwellings and communities, have developed a number of noise abatement measures, of which the noise abatement procedures are one of the most widely adopted. Guglielmo Marconi International Airport, in Italy, is a prototypal case of an urban regional airport, which will probably be seriously constrained by environmental factors in the short–medium term, because of its proximity to the suburbs of the city of Bologna and the growth in air traffic in the last decade. This has encouraged the airport management to take appropriate countermeasures to promote awareness among carriers, encouraging them to limit, as far as possible, their departure operations over inhabited areas during certain time windows. This has led to the formulation of a new initial climb procedure for take-offs from runway 12. In this paper, the effectiveness of this procedure is evaluated by carrying out a before–after analysis of noise curves and percentage of population and sensitive buildings within the noise contours.