Soundscapes and the Acoustic Ecology of Aviation

Soundscapes and the Acoustic Ecology of Aviation

I remember as a kid visiting the old viewing area in Dublin Airport as vividly as if I were still standing there, forehead pressed against the cold glass of the second‑level mezzanine bar on a wet winter night. The rain streaked downward in shimmering rivulets as the windows trembled with each departing aircraft. The early‑generation Ryanair 737‑200 would begin its takeoff roll with a distinctive sound that rose into a chest‑deep rumble, vibrating through the floor beneath my feet. Then came the mighty Lockheed L‑1011 from Delta Airlines, taxiing beneath me. The engines spooled in a slow, hypnotic crescendo as my eyes fixated on the engine spinner spiral swirling rapidly on the cone. My jaw dropped; something in that moment lodged itself inside me, a kind of awe. This is for me, I thought. And I suppose it still is.

What captured me then wasn’t just the sight of flight, the sleek symmetry and beauty of aircraft, the arcs of taxiway lights and runway markers, or the silhouette of aircraft vortices rising and turning into cloud, but the sound. As much as I am enthralled by the visuals, even the scents of aviation, it is the soundscapes of airports that formed some of my earliest, clearest memories of aviation. Soon after, a school trip would seal the deal for me. I was invited into the cockpit on a childhood skiing trip to Imst in Tyrol, Austria, and it captured my imagination and, well, my heart. As I stepped into that warm orange glow, the pilots were chatting casually as ATC advisories murmured in the background, and the Alps stretched out below us like a quilt of white and slate. That was my first real love‑at‑first‑flight moment.

I’ve written before about atmospherics and visuals, but in this piece, I want to take you deeper into the invisible architecture of sound that shapes the aviation world. Sound is a defining, structural element of how our industry functions, how airports are designed, how passengers behave, and how professionals stay safe.

The Soundscape of Ground Ops

When I started out in ground ops, I remember the mandatory ear defenders clamped tight around my head, radios hissing in the background, alarms chirping from equipment as they whisked past, causing me to look this way and that, and the constant, unmistakable thunder of jet engines and drone of turboprops in the environment. Even with dual hearing protection, you still felt it reverberate straight through your ribcage.¹

Whether it was out on the ramps in Dublin, Shannon, Hyannis, or Managua, I learned quickly that sound can actually be a physical hazard and an operational influence. Jet engines generate decibel levels that can cause permanent hearing damage,² and aircraft movement creates vortices and pressure fields that make the air itself behave unpredictably. I recall up in Hyannis getting rugby‑tackled to the ground by a colleague as the combined jet blast from a celebrity’s private jet and the already‑spinning engine of an ATR‑72 tried to drag us both forward—the banksman had signalled start without noticing us behind. The shrill scream of the turbines gave us the half‑second warning we needed. Things can get even louder: a modern GE90‑115B on a 777‑300ER can produce around 140–145 dB at 30 metres.³ That’s louder than a stadium concert speaker right in front of you.

My early years in New England handling the Continental Express ATR‑72s felt like a class lesson in aviation sound ecology. Morning start‑ups were a full sensory chorus: TCAS advisories-Traffic, Traffic -GPWS test alerts-Terrain, Pull Up, Pull Up, whooping alarms, avionics beeps, radio calls, turbine whines, and me trying to shout weight‑and‑balance figures through the din.

Sometimes sound even made things slightly more confusing. For example, during single‑engine turns on Saab 340s, I could hear the starboard propeller but not see it. Even feathered, the blades were nearly invisible, slicing the air mere feet away. Watching children walk across the tarmac with scarves and hats flapping in the prop wash, I often wondered if a gust might pull something toward the engine despite cones and cordons. I kept a very close eye on kids in case they impulsively ran after a cap blown in the wind. It never happened, but those moments crystallised how profoundly sound can distort our sense of distance and risk. I learned that sound always demands respect in operational zones.

Sound in Military Aviation

Step onto a carrier deck or a forward operating base and the soundscape turns brutal. An F/A‑18E Super Hornet launching off catapult two at full afterburner is 150 dB of pure intensity, enough to rupture eardrums and fling unsecured bodies across the deck.⁴ Flight‑deck crews wear robust hearing protection and still suffer the highest rate of noise‑induced hearing loss in any profession on earth.⁵ While working on an airline start-up project I took a business trip to Bombardier in Montréal a few years back. I was working alongside an Air Force general at the time who had flown heavy‑lift transport helicopters for years in Central America. During the visit to Canada, he told me how he now sleeps with the television on every night because the low drone is the only thing that masks the constant ringing of tinnitus earned over decades of rotor‑blade noise exposure. This brought it home to me how long term hearing damage can be from these environments and conditions.

Industry efforts continue to reduce exposure and noise levels, and modern aerospace engineering devotes enormous effort to understanding NVH, noise, vibration, and harshness, and to developing acoustic lining materials, damping panels, and nacelle treatments that tame these forces and protect the men and women working in the field.

Noise Abatement

Civil aviation too has spent half a century looking at ways to reduce its noise footprint. Noise abatement departure procedures (NADP 1 and NADP 2) are choreographed processes involving thrust cuts, acceleration altitudes, and flap schedules designed to shove the thundering noise up and away from sleeping suburbs.⁶ At London Heathrow, the famous Westerly Preference and steep approaches over the Thames are dictated as much by decibel budgets as by wind. Most of the time, aircraft land from the east over London and take off to the west over areas like Berkshire, despite the prevailing westerly winds, in order to minimize noise over densely populated areas. About 30% of the year, when winds come from the east, this pattern is reversed in what is known as easterly operations, but the westerly preference dominates the majority of daylight hours. Pilots have procedures to retard thrust at 1,000–1,500 ft, accelerate cleanly, and then climb out on profile, all while the flight management system calculates the exact second to reduce from takeoff/go-around power to climb power so that the 85 dB footprint doesn’t creep past the M25.⁷ Modern high‑bypass engines with chevron nozzles and continuous‑descent approaches have slashed perceived noise by as much as 50 percent since the 1990s, yet every new runway application still triggers the same furious debate over contour maps and bedtime curfews.⁸

International Regulation

Above the national fray sits ICAO’s Chapter system, currently Chapter 14, the strictest yet.⁹ Every new aircraft type must be 7–10 EPNdB quieter cumulatively across flyover, sideline, and approach than its Chapter 4 predecessor. The A320neo, 787, and A220 all meet margins that would have been science fiction in the 1970s. The Balanced Approach, land‑use planning, operational restrictions, noise charges, and, perhaps only as a last resort, night bans, has been ICAO’s go-to since 2001.¹⁰ Airports like Zürich and Sydney levy noise surcharges that can run into tens of thousands of dollars per movement for older Chapter 3 relics, effectively pricing the noisiest aircraft out of the sky.¹¹ Some airlines held one for as long as made sense for their asset, and I remember flying on one of the operations of the Bahamas Air flight when they were using hush kits on the engines to comply with the noise regulation of the USA.

Aeroacoustics is the scientific discipline that studies sound in aviation. If you want to learn more about some key findings that affect engine engineering today, I would urge you to read the research studies conducted by M.J. Lighthill in 1952, titled On Sound Generated Aerodynamically I: General Theory. It’s a bit too mathematical and lengthy to include here, but its implications are far‑reaching. Engineers model how turbulent jets generate broadband noise, how landing gear and flaps shed vortices that create distinctive whooshes, and how rotating machinery produces repeating tonal patterns known as blade‑pass frequencies. It is a field grounded in equations and flow dynamics but designed to solve some of the most practical challenges in flight, and to work out how to make aircraft quieter, more efficient, and more tolerable for passengers and communities.

The noise levels on the ramp, which can reach 120 to 140 decibels near heavy jet aircraft, reside in a range capable of immediate mechanical damage to the human auditory system. This is why regulatory frameworks like ICAO Annex 16 and FAA Stage 5 standards exist, imposing strict limits on the acoustic footprints aircraft may impose on the environment. As anyone who works in ground ops will attest, when you stand near a widebody at taxi thrust, you are standing beside the very reason these regulations were created.

How Airports Engineer the Passenger Soundscape

Let’s step away from the ramp for a moment and head into a modern airport terminal, and the soundscape changes completely. In modern mega‑terminals, airports now hire acoustic consultants the way cathedrals once hired organ builders. Retail units carefully position speakers so music softens mechanical noise without exceeding the 55 dBA limit.¹² Research from Manchester and Schiphol shows that music at 60–70 bpm, roughly the human resting heart rate, encourages passengers to slow down and linger, increasing retail spending by 20-30 percent.¹³

I spent over six years advising on commercial development at an international airport in Latin America, and the level of attention we paid to acoustics would, I suspect, surprise most travellers. Sound is about shaping emotion, behaviour, and flow.¹⁴ Designers examine reverberation times to avoid harsh echoes from glass and steel.¹⁵ Architectural acoustics becomes especially critical in structures dominated by geometries that naturally amplify acoustic challenges. They calibrate PA systems to rise above chatter without causing fatigue.¹⁶ Many airports design quiet zones with soft seating, low lighting, and absorbent materials so overstimulated travellers can decompress.¹⁷ Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport has many areas designated for this throughout their terminals. Even announcement cadence, the rhythm, pacing, and intonation, is purposefully crafted.¹⁸ Back in the day I had those constant security announcements ringing in my head that went on and on throughout the day. I've noticed a tapering off of that in many locations nowadays, Hard, reflective surfaces allow sound waves to bounce repeatedly, creating reverberation, flutter echoes, and speech intelligibility problems. Open atria compound these effects by enabling long‑distance sound propagation and vertical reflections between floors, often allowing noise from one area to spill into others. To manage this, architects and acoustic engineers employ a combination of absorptive treatments, diffusers, strategic geometry, and material layering to control reflections and decay time. Suspended baffles, microperforated panels, acoustic glass laminates, and fabric‑wrapped surfaces are integrated into the design to tame reflections without compromising the aesthetic clarity often sought in modern architecture. Effective architectural acoustics transforms visually hard spaces into sonically comfortable ones, ensuring that the elegance of glass and steel does not come at the expense of acoustic quality.

Every modern airport is an auditory landscape, escalator hums can be hear in the dead of night, distant high‑pitch shrills of engines, security announcements, soft music, rolling luggage belts, departure chimes and airline gate announcements. All of it blends into an acoustic choreography that influences how calm we feel, how quickly we walk, and how safely we navigate. The science behind it is called acoustic ecology, and it contributes understanding on how to create calmer soundscapes, reduce stress, increase satisfaction, and even improve retail performance.¹⁹ The entire environment is an invisible instrument designed to guide behaviour.

Soundscape and the Taste of Food Inflight

Once airborne, passengers and crew are immersed in a persistent 72–85 dB acoustic environment, a range that has surprising and scientifically validated effects on human perception. Research by Charles Spence (University of Oxford) has shown that continuous broadband noise at these levels tends to suppress sweetness and saltiness, while leaving umami relatively unaffected-or even enhanced.²⁰ This insight helps explain why airline menus often lean into richer, umami‑rich ingredients, tomato, mushrooms, aged cheeses, seaweed. Some carriers even test meals in altitude simulation chambers, replicating real cabin noise to ensure their seasoning and flavor balance works under flight conditions. In other words, the cabin is a multisensory laboratory in which sound plays a decisive role in how passengers experience even the simplest aspects of flight.

Sound Safety

In operations, sound is inseparable from safety. Alerts must cut through noise and cognitive load instantly. That is why GPWS calls are sharp, why TCAS advisories are tonal and decisive, why ATC voices are crisp, clipped, and universally structured.²¹ Aircraft manufacturers treat acoustics as both an engineering variable and a passenger-experience dimension. When I visited Bombardier’s Montréal facility, their team showcased the Atmosphère cabin on the CSeries (now A220). It uses active noise‑cancellation to damp the ~ 90 Hz blade‑pass frequency of the PW1500G geared turbofan by emitting counter-waves through the sidewalls-a remarkable blend of physics and comfort design.²² For other OEMs, modern high-bypass turbofan engines are among the quietest jets because they push a greater volume of air at lower speeds, producing far less noise than the fast, high-velocity exhaust of older turbojets. Their reduced sound levels are aided by technologies such as acoustic liners and chevron-shaped nozzles, which help blend the hot exhaust with surrounding cooler air, smoothing turbulence and softening the engine’s overall noise.

Certain aircraft even have unmistakable sonic signatures. You may have encountered the barking or yelping sound on the Airbus A320 and A330 families, the Power Transfer Unit (PTU), a hydraulic device equalising pressure between systems. I flew with my son on it, and one Dallas morning he looked at me with concern in his eyes and asked if it was normal. It is.

The Soundscapes We Live In

Communities near airports experience sound as an environmental reality, shaping land-use planning, curfews, insulation programmes, and the politics of expansion.²³ Pilots experience it as information, warning, and comfort. Passengers experience it as an emotion component, excitement, anxiety, familiarity. And aviation professionals ourselves live inside it daily as both a companion and a potential hazard.

Soundscapes are as much a part of aviation’s architecture as steel and composites. They frame how we remember flights, how we work in the industry, how airports feel, and how we experience aircraft. One can see that with the electrification of propulsion, things will get quieter, and it is a task that engineers are grappling with around the world. Whether it’s your favorite travel playlist that brings positive feelings flooding back into your mind and creates that holiday feeling, or just a day on the job, the soundscape is a huge part of our industry. I believe that it warrants much more research and development and forms an important part of efforts to build a sustainable and better future for the industry and its stakeholders. At the very least I wanted to draw your attention to is, so that you may appreciate it in some more detail the next time you are travelling or working.

For me, it all loops back to a rain-soaked mezzanine window in Dublin Airport, a child watching that Ryanair 737-200 thunder down runway 28 into the night, mesmerised by a world filled with a fascinating cacophony of sound. I was even lucky enough to work with them in Flight Operations for a number of years and see up close how the new generation of aircraft are so much quieter than before.

Hope this article gave you some insight, have a great one. Noel

Principal Aviation Consultant, avcox

References

1. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Aircrew and Noise. (2024).

2. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Occupational Noise Exposure – Overview. (n.d.).

3. Aviation Stack Exchange. Jet engine sound and dB levels. (2023).

4. U.S. Navy / Office of Naval Research. “Jet‑aircraft noise transmitted via bone conduction above 150 dB.” (2009).

5. U.S. Department of Defense Hearing Center of Excellence. Noise‑induced hearing loss in military personnel (2024).

6. Yankaskas, K. (2017). Military aviation noise and hearing loss. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine. The journal is now known as Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance. For more information, visit the Aerospace Medical Association.

7. ICAO Circular 317 – Effects of PANS‑OPS Noise Abatement Departure Procedures. (2019).

8. London Heathrow Airport. Noise management strategy and NADP compliance. (2024).

9. European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Environmental report: 50 % noise reduction since 2000. (2023).

10. ICAO. Annex 16, Volume I – Aircraft Noise, Chapter 14. (2017 / 2020).

11. ICAO Doc 9829 – Balanced Approach to Aircraft Noise Management. (2008, amended 2022).

12. Sydney Airport. Aircraft noise levy and movement cap regulations. (2024).

13. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Airport terminal noise management and acoustic design. (2022).

14. Jacob, C. Research on how music at specific tempos changes passenger behavior (2023).

15. FAA. Guidance on airport terminal design and passenger flow. (2021).

16. Wilson Ihrig & Associates. Acoustics consultancy report (2023).

17. HARMAN Professional Solutions. Airport PA‑system design & calibration (2024).

18. FAA. Quiet zones and passenger comfort in terminals (2023).

19. Transportation Research Board. Study on announcement cadence and passenger comprehension (2022).

20. Spence, C., Michel, C., & Smith, B. (2014). Airplane noise and the taste of umami. Flavour, 3(2), 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-3-2

21. FAA. Human factors in alert design for aviation safety (2024).

22. Airbus. Active noise‑cancellation in the A220 (Atmosphère cabin) (2025).

23. FAA. Community noise, land‑use planning, and airport expansion (2024).