Complaints versus Complainers
Everyone complains about something at sometime, whether it be about noise, the government, the weather or the meal you had at a restaurant that was good, but could have been better.
Airports seem to have a special place in the hearts of complainers because they can marshal a cause and have a really good whinge and feel that they have made a difference. The argument "well, the airport was there way before you were" does not wash with these people. If anything, it increases their fully self believed sense of entitlement even further.
You can pick these people - they latch onto a cause with as much gusto as they can muster. They speak about it incessently and any social interaction with them will turn to their issue as sure as a Jabiru engine will self detonate for no reason.
They are consumed by it, and every aircraft heading for 16L/R or leaving on 34L/R hardens their resolve to "Stop the Noise!" even more. At this point the complainer has become irrational in their belief in their cause.
Mainstream media hear the noise and start to feature the complainer in news articles. The complainer, feeling vindicated ("Look! I'm in the paper. I must be right.") steps up by complaining even more. Like that *coughtwatcough* at Kellyville. Every twenty minutes. Every twenty minutes to complain that his amenity is affected even though it is obvious to most sane people that it is not.
And this is where the statistics about noise complaints become skewed. Looking at the ASA noise complaints reports, the single statistic that is missing is how many individual complaints are there? If there are 96 complaints in a month, were there 96 complainants? There will not be. I do recall a noise statistic for YSSY that there were 360 complaints made in a month, by 2 individuals living in Summer Hill (about 6km or so from the threshold of 16R). Husband and wife. Whipped up into a froth of rage over something that whilst it can be annoying becomes, as another poster pointed out, white noise over time.
We see these types of individual at every strata of society, but with even the Gen X'ers becoming a bunch of self-entitled prats, it's going to get worse. As someone on twitter put it the other day: "Because, because....MANUFACTURED OUTRAGE". Well played.
For transparency: I love aviation. If I could live under a flight path, i'd do it in a heartbeat.