Location comparison: every airport is different

As already shown in the time comparison in the Rhine-Main region, the proportion of "highly annoyed" persons also played an important role in the location comparison. All participants who evaluated their noise-related annoyance with either 4 or 5 are regarded by the scientists as "highly annoyed".

In this way the NORAH team found out that the people at the different locations felt annoyed to very different degrees: more people in Cologne/Bonn feel annoyed by continuous sound levels up to about 52 decibels than in Stuttgart and Berlin-Brandenburg. With increasing loudness, the proportion of "highly annoyed" persons rises in Stuttgart. The proportion of "highly annoyed" persons is even higher in the environs of Frankfurt airport: as of a sound level of around 45 decibels, more people in the Rhine-Main region in 2013 felt highly or extremely annoyed than at the other airports. In 2011 there were more "highly annoyed" persons in Frankfurt at sound levels over 47 decibels than in Cologne/Bonn. In 2012 the annoyance in Frankfurt was especially high compared with the other three locations – probably due to the change effect. Even at a continuous sound level from around 42 decibels, considerably more people in the region felt "highly annoyed" by air traffic noise than at the other three locations. However, at all four investigated airports the noise-related annoyance is higher than would be expected on the basis of the standard graphs used in the European Union to calculate air traffic noise-related annoyance.

A somewhat different picture emerged when the scientists analyzed the answers on sleep quality at the various locations. Within the framework of the Quality of Life Study, the NORAH team did not directly examine the sleep quality of the study participants, but rather asked them to what extent their sleep was disturbed by traffic noise. A five-point scale was again used here. The result: in 2011, i.e. before the introduction of the curfew on scheduled flights between 23:00 and 05:00 hrs at Frankfurt airport, the people in this region felt considerably more disturbed in their sleep by air traffic noise than those at other airports - at both low and high continuous sound levels. In the two following years, the sleep disturbances decreased somewhat from the point of few of the people concerned in the Frankfurt region: at continuous sound levels from around 57 decibels, the people here perceived their sleep as less disturbed than the respondents in the environs of the planned Berlin-Brandenburg airport. At lower continuous sound levels the people in the Rhine-Main region still felt more disturbed in their sleep. This is followed in second place by the respondents in the environs of Cologne/Bonn airport. A further analysis of the answers showed that the respondents were mainly of the opinion that they slept better through the night after the introduction of the night flight curfew at Frankfurt airport. Their assessments of the sleep onset and REM sleep phases differ substantially less from each other in the three years. For further results on the sleep quality in the Rhine-Main region, please refer to the NORAH Sleep Study (see NORAH Knowledge No. 10 – results of the Sleep Study).