Abstract
The "Attitudes to Aircraft Annoyance Around Airports" (5A) pilot study used focus groups and written surveys to investigate aspects of living in the area around airports and to better understand the annoyance felt by such residents at a European level. This exploratory study focused on aircraft noise impact as a key source of annoyance around three airports: Manchester International Airport, Lyon Saint-Exupéry and Bucharest and attempted to identify the importance of noise in relation to other aspects. The questionnaire was designed using stated preference techniques offering a series of hypothetical choices related to changes in frequencies of aircraft movements, during different periods of the day thereby allowing a monetary valuation to be made of one aircraft movement. In order to analyse the annoyance as a function of noise, rather than movements, it was necessary to reliably model noise data for the current situation and for each option in the Stated Preference experiments at each respondent's address. The EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre's ENHANCE tool and the Integrated Noise Model enables aircraft noise to be modelled based on actual recorded radar data. Respondents'attitude could be directly correlated to the noise created by real aircraft events at the place where the respondent experienced them. This did not prove to be possible for Bucharest due to a lack of reliable cartography. The present paper explains the use of the ENHANCE tool in this context and the methods used to determine the values of different indices for each respondent, for all hypotheses, to reach informed conclusions about personal preferences and values concerning the perception of aircraft noise and a valuation of noise and annoyance.