July 2022 DCA Noise Meeting Summary
Meeting Highlights
MWAA Update: We continue to see steady recovery in the air travel sector despite the continuing impacts of the pandemic on business travel, the effect of inflation on fuel and ticket prices, and airline staffing issues. Leisure travel continues to lead the recovery. Business and international travel are coming back also. Passenger levels are back near 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
FAA Update: Presentations on the Agency’s Noise Compliant Portal and Its Health Impacts Research
The FAA launched a nationwide noise complaint portal in 2020. Most of the DCA Working Group members were not aware it existed. Durre Cowan, from the FAA’s Office Environment and Energy provided an overview.
Cowan (FAA): A concern or a complaint would go through the portal. Data goes to the web form, the system routes the message to the correct regional administrator's office, it's reviewed, and then assigned to the appropriate office. Our goal is to have a thorough research response in two weeks or less, but sometimes it takes a full 30 days.
Airports are typically the first point of contact for noise at their facility, and they can chose to participate in the FAA's Partnering Airport Program for noise complaint responses. DCA is not a partnering airport, but we would welcome the opportunity to have you all be part of the program.
Discussion and Questions Followed
Don Scata (FAA): I manage the Noise division in the Office of Environment and Energy. Durre is one of the folks in my division that, so we handle noise complaints for the agency as well. I'll be focusing today on some programs where we're looking at potential health impacts related to aviation noise exposure.
Under our Health Impacts Research Program, we're working extensively with our university partner sponsored through The Ascent Center of Excellence and the FAA Tech Center.
With Boston University's School of Public Health, we're engaged in a program to evaluate associations between aircraft noise exposure and cardiovascular disease outcomes.
With the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, we're conducting a new national sleep study to quantify the relationship between aircraft noise exposure on sleep disturbance.
We're sponsoring research with Boston University that's looking at leveraging existing longitudinal health cohorts from the Nurses Health Study and its following study, the Nurses Health Study 2. These efforts are evaluating potential links between health outcomes and aircraft noise exposure, while accounting for a wide variety of factors.
We're looking at the associations between noise and hypertension in the nurse's health study using 55DNL cut-point. The researchers examined the data and found that in a parsimonious model, which is adjusted for age, calendar year, race, physical activity, smoking status, and alcohol use found a 10 percent increased risk of hypertension with a 95% confidence interval of 1 to 19 percent. The analysis is looking at using a 45 DBNT cut point due to small numbers of participants occurring at higher noise exposure levels. It's the studies looking at aircraft noise and sleep. It's looking at associations between nighttime noise and insufficient sleep and poor sleep quality and NHS data. Looking at multivariable adjusted longitudinal models, census block groups exposed to nighttime aircraft noise show higher odds of insufficient sleep compared with those not exposed.
