A screencap showing recent tweets related to ‘aircraft noise and mental health’ (click on image to listen to source podcast)
“…It actually blights your home. It’s the intrusion, principally, it’s the disturbance that it causes to your life and your well-being, and it’s difficult to relax. We’re on edge subconsciously, to some extent. There’s an anticipatory element to it, when you didn’t know quite when they were going to stop or when they were going to start again. And you then find out that you’re actually powerless…..”
– a comment by a UK aviation noise victim, during the radio interview
BBC’s radio show, ‘All in The Mind’, hosted by Claudia Hammonds, recently included an excellent presentation on the mental health impacts of aircraft noise. A few hours was spent creating a transcription, posted below:
Click on the image below for a scrollable view; the PDF file may be downloaded.
For people impacted by aviation noise, the damage is more than doubled when the ‘system’ discounts their complaints and attacks each noise victim with a ‘gee, what is the matter with YOU?’ stance. Thus, science confirming noise impact concerns is validating to noise victims, even liberating.
Today’s FAA is completely failing to ‘balance’ airline/industry profits with community livability. FAA became coopted years ago; this failed regulatory agency is ‘all in for Aviation Commerce’.
What we clearly need, in the UK and in the U.S., is to have this balance restored. Here in the U.S., a good first step would be to waste no more time and take away from FAA the oversight responsibility for aviation noise impacts. We need to restore EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control (ONAC), which was abruptly defunded in early 1981.
See also:
- Mental Health and Aircraft Noise: Frankly, Who Gives a Damn? – (aiREFORM Post, 4/23/2016)
- What Is NextGen’s Environmental Vision? – aiREFORM Post, 6/10/2015
- ‘The Dormant Noise Control Act and Options To Abate Noise Pollution’ – an in-depth analysis of U.S. aviation noise politics, written by Sidney Shapiro (November 1991, 34p)
- ‘The Dormant Noise Control Act and Options To Abate Noise Pollution (FOOTNOTES)’ – footnotes to Sidney Shapiro’s in-depth analysis report
- ‘Information on Levels of Environmental Noise Requisite to Protect Public Health and Welfare with an Adequate Margin of Safety’ – (EPA ONAC Report from March 1974, 242p)