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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

>That’s because with one click, Deckert has done what could have taken her hours to do a few months ago — she has filed a noise complaint with officials at the Maryland Aviation Administration.

One thing though is that the very ease diminishes how much attention the officials actually pay. Same as when you contact your officials, a hand written letter or phone call is much more effective than an email template or a retweet. When they got a noise complaint in the past, they would have thought: this bothered them enough to spend an hour filling out a noise complaint. Now, they can think: this bothered them enough to spend half a second to push a conveniently located button or use an app.

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The amount of data it collects and files hopefully makes it harder to dismiss. It is using the same ADS-B data as flightradar and similar sites, so it's able to report detailed information- exact time, what aircraft passed overhead, how far away, what altitude and ground speed. At a lot of airports, there are requirements for climb-out paths (in terms of position and altitude) for noise abatement, and if operators aren't observing existing rules, these detailed reports can have a lot of force.

Right, they're just going to filter that stuff out as noise. If not today very soon. Unless actual means are taken to address the issues and the nature of the complaints changes/abates. Sorta like having overly verbose log messages replete with far too many warnings no one addresses, it becomes less useful as a tool.

”It’s highly, highly therapeutic. It makes you feel like you can make a difference.”

And that's the business model for something like this in a nutshell.

> One thing though is that the very ease diminishes how much attention the officials actually pay.

The point isn't to get aviation officials to care. You want to build up a body of complaints to give your congressional rep something to make noise about. This has been an ongoing fight in Boston.

> You want to build up a body of complaints to give your congressional rep something to make noise about.

Congressional reps tend to care more about evidence that either donors they rely on or voters in their district care enough to take substantive action than numerical volume of complaints or even substance of the complaints (ease of complaints degrades value more for Congressional reps than even for aviation officials, as the latter are more likely to have some concern for the subject matter and rather than merely the political calculus.)

The voters in their district are the people complaining. Boston Logan rerouted air traffic to climb out over the city rather than the harbor. This has led to long daylong stretches of overflights every 90 seconds. Katherine Clarke, Stephen Lynch and Mike Capuano have been beating a drum about this for the past two years. The point of generating complaints is to give them an artifact to wave at the FAA.

In a properly functioning regulatory environment, an independent third party would establish a noise sensor monitoring network around the airport and use that data as feedback to stakeholders (officials, aircraft operators, private citizens around the airport). Failing that, you have angry citizens who push the button hard, and officials who (as you mentioned) don't care, which will probably end up with press (ie this article) and possibly a citizen caring enough to run against disinterested officials.

This is almost exactly what happens in the USA. Pretty much all of the major airports, and many of the intermediate airports have aircraft noise monitoring systems. See [0] for example.

[0] https://www.dfwairport.com/aircraftnoise/

The officials already made clear that passenger comfort isn’t a priority; they could have mandated that airlines install noise sensors and file monthly reports with their data, but instead they chose to require passengers to risk suffering and then have to file complaints to seek recompense for it.

Assuming you only read the title of the post I can understand your reply, but I would suggest a cursory glance at articles before replying.

The noise complaints are coming from people under the flight path, not from within the cabin.

Ah, nuts, I misread before the “You’ve read too much” cutoff kicked in on the site. Oh well.

I miss the plane noise from my prior home. A bit odd to me that people object to it, so I’ll stay out of it.

Article has nothing to do with passengers.

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