Heathrow Airlines' Noise Ratings
 

Heathrow Airport has released the first of its quarterly noise league tables sorted by airline. The link to the press release and table is:

Heathrow - Press releases - Airlines rated on noise performance

Perhaps no surprise that short haul services come top.

Comments?

SFS

The choice of airlines seems rather strange. There are around 80 airlines currently operating into LHR, so why show only 50 - were there no track-keeping or CDA violations by the other 30 ?

http://mediacentre.heathrowairport.c...=1887&SizeId=3

"Every three months a Fly Quiet table will take the top 50 Heathrow airlines (by number of flights per quarter)".

Yes, it does indeed say that. To quote further from the explanatory notes:

"this aims to eliminate skewing results by including operators with infrequent operations"

But how exactly would including carriers like Kuwait, TAM, PIA, Royal Air Maroc, Korean, etc - all of whom fly into Heathrow every day - have "skewed" the results ?

I don't see any reason why the other 30 or so scheduled operators couldn't have been listed as well.

Predictably, the media have picked up on the story and are misinterpreting the results (for which they can hardly be blamed, given the way they were presented).

From (I think) the Times, via Tw*tter:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BYYSZcYCMAAYmxn.jpg:large

No, entries 44-50 in Heathrow's list are not the "noisiest airlines"

Among the airlines that serve Heathrow regularly, but don't appear in the list at all, are several with elderly, high-QC (i.e. noisy) types in their fleets, and at least one of the missing airlines clocked up a red-flag "pre-0600" infringement during those three months.

Nice idea, poorly executed ...

DaveReidUKIndeed. They did not produce two lists showing short haul and heavies. Did they at leat produce an annex with tables of what each machine was? Then some like-for-like could be done but this is just pure fodder for the tabloids.

But the most important fact that seems to present itself from the graphic - is that all the hard work and regulations of the past decade has worked! The higest level reached is only 72dB and is directly (as far as one can tell on this large scale graphic) at threshold. :ok:

So, it looks like HACAN should be congratulating and thanking all the airlines and EGLL mgmt for their good work. :}

So does green mean no violations in that category, yellow slight violation, red big violation?

No, you are misinterpreting the graphic.

Those are not point dB values, they are simply the keys to the shaded areas on the map, which are the recently-published 2012 Noise Exposure Contours (that's why those Leq values are spaced at 3dB intervals).

They don't represent instantaneous or peak values from individual movements or airlines.

Follow the link in the first post for an explanation of what the colours mean.

Thanks Dave. Interesting to see BA and EI (ei planes and crew operating Little Red) are the top 2. It always surprises me how many slots EI have there

MAN was publishing noise league tables in the 1970s; however not sure what they do now however...