DAVYJ Will Annoy Significantly More People than Either SERFR or BIGSUR

Our friend Jay Su from Quiet Skies Mid Peninsula took the FAA noise contour data from the Santa Cruz Coast to the edge of the Bay and integrated it with fine grained population data. He plugged this into the Schultz equation to calculate the number of people highly annoyed. You can read his methods and results here.

The average total number of people highly annoyed by this method calculate to

BSUR        674

SERFR       821

DAVYJ      1016

Number Highly Annoyed

Tracon Filling the Corridor over our Cities with Airplane

TCR

It appears that the FAA is getting closer to their goal of maximizing the number of flights into the narrow corridor that just happens to overlie our city. Our friend Tom Rindfleisch monitored flights over North Palo Alto for the week of Aug 16 > 23, 2016. On Aug 16, he noted a 2 hour period during which time there were 62 flights, one each 2 minutes.

Since one of the goals of NextGen is to maximize throughput into and out of airports, this is likely exactly what the FAA is trying to accomplish. Note the regularity of the peaks.

You may notice that the Y axis gives higher levels than you are used to seeing. This is because Tom measured dBC levels, rather than the more familiar dBA. The dBC measurement includes all the sound power that can be picked up by the microphone including the low frequencies that we can feel as well as hear.  The dBA level listens only to the higher frequencies and discounts the lower frequencies.

The only way to deal with this fairly is to spread it out so that everyone shares.