Just how loud are flights at Palomar-McClellan Airport? Neighbors, San Diego County disagree

The neighbors of McClellan-Palomar Airport have long been frustrated with the way San Diego County tracks the noise of the flights at the Carlsbad airport. So they installed their own system. 

Neighbors have complained of airplane engines roaring over their homes day and night for years. But those concerns escalated in the past two years after the county approved new commercial flights with American Airlines and United Airlines. 

Residents and the city of Carlsbad have sued over the new contracts, but officials at the county and the Federal Aviation Administration have said San Diego County has no authority over flights, even at an airport that it manages. It also has no authority to enforce a mandatory curfew. 

The county does have a data dashboard on its website in which it tracks airport operations and noise, but the residents say it is insufficient. They plan to present their own data during public comment at the Palomar Airport Advisory Committee meeting Thursday night.

The eight-member committee appointed by the Board of Supervisors meets every other month at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce to oversee the airport and offer any recommendations to the Board of Supervisors. 

Neighbors say they spent about $15,000 to contract with a company called Get Noisy, which operates an artificial intelligence automated airplane noise detection and tracking system. By December, they had placed 12 monitors at people’s homes around North County: nine in Carlsbad, and one in Escondido, San Marcos, and Vista. Those devices track the time of the noise, the maximum sound, the flight number and the distance of the plane. 

The residents say that more than one-third of the 7,636 flights the monitors picked up last month – 2,752 or 36% – were above 75 dBA, which is a reading on a weighted decibel scale that’s considered louder than a vacuum cleaner or chamber music in a small auditorium, according to the Yale noise monitoring scale. The 2,752 incidents averaged to about 91 per day in April. 

The homeowners’ data used the “Single Event Noise Exposure Level” metric to monitor the sound of a single moment. They say that most closely matches what people experience when an airplane flies over their home. That’s different from the 24-hour average “Community Noise Equivalent Level” the county uses. 

The 7,636 events the residents’ technology recorded in April to register the rise and fall of a noise change mostly lasted around 30 to 40 seconds, but residents say that when there are several jets in a row, it can be anywhere from half an hour to a full hour of jet noise at a time. 

Of the events they tracked, 326 occurred between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. 

Ten percent of the flights were at 80-85 dba, which reaches the level in which sustained exposure may result in hearing loss, according to Yale’s categorization. Four percent were even higher.

The higher end is equivalent to the sound of city traffic. 

By comparison, the county’s six monitors collectively tracked 12,169 flights in April, and about 7,170, or 59%, were over 70 decibels of noise, which is louder than the sound of a normal conversation.

Each of their six monitors cost around $40,000 to purchase and install, spokesperson Donna Durckel said. Durckel said the “CNEL” metric the county uses weights nighttime noise more than daytime sounds, and that the average avoids single event bias. 

She said there is no record of any airport sponsor using Get Noisy to monitor noise data, and that the county does not have access to the system. Without that, it can’t verify how it calculates noise.

“The County does not have access to the Get Noisy system to verify how it calculates noise metrics and whether it uses true CNEL methodology, and we do not know where the noise systems are located in the community, or if monitoring planes to or from Palomar versus aircraft just passing through the airspace,” she said. “Without this information, we cannot confirm the accuracy of the reported noise levels or flight counts.”

The residents acknowledge that their data collection wouldn’t meet the scrutiny required for the Federal Aviation Administration, but maintain it is more representative of their lived experiences. 

Get Noisy CEO Johannes Moenius agreed. 

“Averages are not really helpful when you get woken up at night,” he told inewsource.