You live near the airport!

“People who live near the airport and then complain about the noise are idiots.”
“You knew the airport was there when you bought/built your house.”

These are some of the comments that routinely pop up on social media, or on the national airwaves, when this problem is discussed. There is a fantastic assumption that anyone complaining about the noise lives near the airport. There are a couple of ways to demonstrate how unreasonable that assumption is:

1. Ashbourne is about 11.5km from the centre of the airport. Let’s draw a circle.

Looks like large areas of Dublin’s south side (D4 and D6) are also “near the airport”.

2. Let’s flip a track from the north runway and use it on the south runway:

The blue track is radar data from an actual flight. This was downloaded and graphically flipped onto the south runway as the green track. Looks like many of Dublin’s leafy suburbs wouldn’t like it much if the illegal track used on north County Dublin and south Meath were applied to the south runway. So why is it OK “up there near the airport” but not in important neighborhoods?

Click the image if you’d like to zoom in. You’ll see names like Harold’s Cross, Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge and Sandymount. Would anyone in D4 or D6 really describe their neighborhoods as “near the airport”.

What idiot living in Ranelagh doesn’t expect to hear loud aircraft going overhead every 2 minutes? They should have checked before the bought there, right?