To protect the neighbors, Long Beach Airport limits the allowed number of commercial aircraft operations and the aggregate amount of noise they can generate.

Orange County Airport employs a different tactic - a limit on the number of passengers that can be served. This raises the question:

Does increasing the number of passengers increases the noise if they fill otherwise empty seats or they fly on newer, quieter aircraft?

In 2002, John Wayne Airport served 7,903,066 passengers. For 2003, the negotiated MAP cap at John Wayne Airport was raised from the old limit of 8.4 million annual passengers (MAP) to 10.3 MAP. Air traffic increased gradually.

By calendar year 2007, the airport served 9,979,699 passengers. In 5 years, between 2002 and 2007, annual traffic increased by just over 2 million passengers.

How much additional noise did the 2 million passenger increase generate?

The answer is in information collected by the airport’s Noise Abatement Program. Data for 2002 is included in the 2003 report archived on this website  and data for 2007 is on the airport’s site 

Each report presents the average noise for a year at the airport’s ten noise monitoring stations.

Stations 1S through 7S are south of the airport.  1S, 2S and 3S are closest to the airport, the others are further south towards the center of Newport Beach.

8N, the noisiest location, is north of the runway in Irvine. 9N is in Santa Ana and 10N is in Tustin.

The following table shows that the average noise readings (CNEL dB) at the monitoring stations changed very little from 2002 to 2007. Noise at several monitors, including those closest to the center of Newport and Balboa Island decreased. One monitor recorded an increase of one decibel.

    (1) January -December 2002 map is not available on the Internet

It should be no surprise that two million passengers would have little measurable noise impact.

Newport Beach officials predicted this outcome in 2002 prior to the MAP cap being raised. People don’t make noise, planes do.

With airlines allowed to fill empty seats, the number of carrier operations rose by only 8 percent while the passenger count rose 26 percent.

Air carrier operations increased from 84,597 in 2002 to 91,368 in 2007. This increase of 6,771 commercial takeoffs and landings computes to 19 additional operations per day - an average of 9-1/2 takeoffs and 9-1/2 landings per day spread over the 15 hours that the airport operates.

To the folks on the ground, that one additional takeoff overhead every hour-and-a-half or so may have been an additional annoyance but it meant that the county spared the traveling public the annoyance of 2 million annual round trips on the freeways to more distant airports.