Aviation noise from Badgerys Creek in Western Sydney

Previously I wrote a post showing the potential flight paths of Badgerys Creek airport; today's post is to try to get an understanding of what that means in terms of noise for local residents. What noise will you experience if you live under one of these flight paths?

Unfortunately if you read the newspaper and look at their maps you will probably walk away with a false impression of whether you will be affected by noise. This is because most articles show the ANEF map; this has already be proven to be misleading as found by a senate committee (see http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/aviation/environmental/transparent_noise/expanding/index.aspx). People want to know how noise will be like on a bad day or night rather than just an average. The real issue is that the purpose of the ANEF map was never meant to show the community the possible noise impact to them but rather how noise will impact city planning and zoning. The community however has a much stricter criteria; they aren't interested if they can get away with developing a house - they rather know that if they lived there what the noise would be like for them.

Firstly just so you may have an understanding of the information I've attached further down in this post I've grabbed the below examples of sound and their "loudness" in decibels (db) from Sydney Airport's noise management plan. Note that the decibel scale is not linear - an increase in 10db represents a doubling of the sound volume.

Threshold of pain 140db+
Pneumatic drill (unsilenced at 7m distance) 95db
Heavy diesel lorry (40km/h at 7m distance) 83db
Modern twin-engine jet (taking off at 152m distance) 81db
B737-800 jet: arriving at Sydney Airport (flying over Leichhardt) 75.4db
B737-800 jet: departing from Sydney Airport (flying over Croydon) 2 70.9db
Passenger car (60km/h at 7m distance) 70db
Office environment 60db
Ordinary conversation 50db
Library reading room 40db
Quiet bedroom 35db
Threshold of hearing 0db

Nowdays airports in their noise management plans show three maps in their plans. These include:

• The ANEF map
• The N70 map which shows areas that are likely to be affected by aircraft noise above 70db and how often in a 24 hour period.
• The N60 map which shows areas that are likely to be affected by aircraft noise above 60db. This is normally provided for nighttime exposure only since this is the sound level that when inside will cause you to wake up from sleep.

The rationale for choosing 70db as the sound level for these maps comes from the fact that any sound above 60db will disrupt indoor conversation and general household activities. Assuming your inside your house a 70db sound outdoors will be reduced to 60db by the time it makes it inside. In other words it's really 60db of sound that will be disruptive; its just lucky your always inside right?

I've put the N70 maps below of Badgerys Creek and Sydney Airport for you to compare.

N70 Map for Badgerys Creek Option A Operation 1 - Takeoffs to North East (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N70 Map for Badgerys Creek Option A Operation 2 - Takeoffs to South West (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N70 Map for Badgerys Creek Option C Operation 1 - Takeoffs to North (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N70 Map for Badgerys Creek Option C Operation 2  - Takeoffs to South (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N70 map for Sydney Airport (Source: Sydney Airport Master Plan 2033)

N60 maps are also shown as well by established airports (see Bankstown Airport Noise Plan and Sydney airport night time curfew maps) which has more of a bearing on outdoor activities. Unfortunately for us Western Sydney locals we only have a predicted night time N60 map that in my opinion isn't much use. This is because it has been compiled with the assumption that there is a lot less aircraft traffic during the night and therefore less noise to measure. I don't believe this assumption to be correct since one of the main appeals of this airport is that it probably won't have a curfew and Mascot will continue to do so. It could just very well be night time passengers and freight are the main markets for this airport who would otherwise have to wait for a slot outside curfew hours at Sydney Airport - at this stage we don't know.

To illustrate my point even with a curfew the N60 maps over the sea provided by Sydney Airport look like below - there are still 20+ events per night 12.5km's away near Bundeena even with curfew restrictions. Contrasting this the Badgerys EIS only tells you that you will get more than 5 events each night at this distance. Sydney Airport also has the advantage of being able to send planes out to sea of course:

N60 Map for Badgerys Creek Option A (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N60 Map for Badgerys Creek Option C (Source: Supplement to Draft EIS Second Sydney Airport Proposal Volume 3 Supplement Part E Chpt 8)

N60 Night Time Curfew Map for Sydney Airport (Source: Sydney Airport Master Plan 2033)

Despite my previous doubts on the N60 map shown above for both Option A and Option C runway configurations it still shows that unfortunately there will be many sleepless nights for the people in the areas nearby (e.g Leppington, Mulgoa Rise and more). It has to be noted that these N60 maps were made in 1997; a lot of housing development has happened since then. There is the reason why in 2009 the Aviation White Paper released by the Labor Government ruled out the use of Badgerys Creek - "Badgerys Creek is no longer an option. It has been overtaken by years of urban growth in the area and is inconsistent with future NSW spatial planning and land use development for the south-west region of Sydney."

What I would like to see in any updated EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) is an N60 worst day (in the daytime) map for each runway configuration that is proposed similar to the one Sydney Airport prepared for its night time hours. That's what likely to be disruptive to your day to day activities when your for example enjoying a family picnic or playing an outdoor sport. This should then be shown to the community so they fully understand what noise they will experience and where it will be located.

Is this really an airport for Western Sydney?

Many people have quoted that this is an airport meant to serve Western Sydney first and foremost while others have asserted that it really is just a way to palm off the inner cities problems to the west. Seeing both sides of the argument made me wonder - who is right? What does the data say? Of course what really got me suspicious was this quote in the airport announcements fact sheet:

"Based on analysis in the Joint Study on aviation capacity in the Sydney region, residents of Western Sydney have a lower propensity to undertake air travel than the Sydney average."
Sourced from https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/aviation/airport/western_sydney/files/Fact_Sheet_4_The_benefits_of_an_airport_at_Badgerys_Creek.pdf

Knowing the demand for aviation services at the airport is useful to answer a number of questions such as:

• Is the infrastructure investment required for the airport worth it for the taxpayer or is it better spent elsewhere?
• Does the benefits to the community in economic activity and therefore jobs outweigh the usual negative impacts on an airport to the local area? No demand means no jobs.
• Will this be a "white elephant" project?
• Are the negative externalities (i.e. costs) of an airport being borne by a different group than the people who gain the benefits from it? (e.g. locals may hardly ever fly but still cop the noise from the airport)
• Will the amount of users moving to the newer airport be enough to help alleviate the constraints at Kingsford Smith (e.g. movement caps in peak hour times)
• Is this overall the appropriate location of the airport?

In fact without a realistic assessment of demand it probably isn't prudent for the private sector to even think about investing capital into building an airport here in Western Sydney.

Demand forecasting is a tricky business and has a lot of assumptions so I will leave that to others. My one assumption however is that the current location of the airport for Western Sydney (i.e Kingsford Smith) isn't the factor why local residents don't travel often. I base this assumption on the fact that since the airport isn't even an hour away from the main proposed market of Badgerys I can use current demand data on the airport that currently serves this group of the population. I think this is a realistic assumption to make; I out here in the west can get on a plane if I choose to without too much hassle on my part.

I came across two studies that gave me the information I needed. Both confirmed that the local area - that is South West Sydney - are definitely weak users of air travel compared to pretty much the rest of Sydney in general.

The first graph I saw came from the Sydney Airport Ground Travel Plan 2006. As part of coming up with this document Sydney Airport conducted a survey as to where their passengers originated from when travelling to the airport and where arrivals were heading to. All up the Western Sydney markets composed of about 10% of the known demand here as shown in the figure from the document below.

Passenger Origin-Destination from Kingsford Smith Airport (Source: Sydney Airport Ground Travel Plan 2006)

If we use these percentages with the current level of passengers per year at Sydney Airport (see Sydney Airport Performance Highlights) we end up with very approximately 3.7 million passengers per year from Western Sydney. It is a possibility that the 4% in the "Blacktown - Baulkham Hills" category is more from the Hills area than it is from Blacktown area but without the raw survey data I can't really verify this as of yet (i.e more demand from North Western Sydney).

The more interesting bit of information however in this graph is where the real demand for aviation in Sydney comes from:

• Inner Sydney (includes the CBD) leads usage of the airport at 36%
• The Eastern Seaboard from the Eastern Suburbs to the Northern Beaches adds up to 19%.
• 10% of the demand comes from the south east of Sydney; also well located by Kingsford Smith.

What this suggests of course is that the current airport is very well located next to the users that typically use aviation services. Improving this airport if possible therefore has a lot more "bang for buck" in terms of economic activity since its current location is closer to where its demand is situated. In my opinion it also suggests that maybe the original first proposal of Galston from a purely demand driven perspective was a better location for the second airport site given demand seems stronger along the Sydney coastline and the northern half of Sydney (see Second Sydney Airport-A Chronology).

A more recent study conducted by the Government (see Joint Study on Sydney Aviation Capacity 2012) also backs up that demand in general is weak in the Western Sydney area. This is partly due to the development restrictions there of course but even where the population centres are it is visible that the demand in Western Sydney is lacking compared to the anything east of Parramatta. Looking more carefully it is also visible that there is more demand originating from North Western Sydney (i.e the locally known Hills Council falls into this area) than other Western Sydney areas.

UPDATE(25/09/2014): I have found a clearer map than the one displayed in the Joint Aviation Sydney from one of its source technical papers (see http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/aviation/airport/western_sydney/sydney_av_cap/files/Technical_Papers_Volume_1-Joint_Study_on_Aviation_Capacity_in_the_Sydney_Region.pdf) which I have placed first underneath this paragraph. It clearly shows that the strong demand comes from the coastline areas of Sydney with demand generally getting weaker as you go out west towards the Badgerys site.

Map of Sydney Aviation Demand by Region (Source: BITRE analysis of NVS, 2005‐2009 pooled data (Tourism Research Australia), converted to annual trips. )

Distribution of air trips in the Sydney region, by suburb (Joint Study of Aviation Capacity for the Sydney region 2012 p.87)

From just looking at the above graphs from two independent data sources it seems that Western Sydney as a whole is probably not the main market for this airport at the present time. Furthermore I could say it may not be the infrastructure that Western Sydney is "demanding" at all.

Of course in the future there are visions that with the population growth in Western Sydney increasing that this will change somewhat and that's probably true to an extent. However with 43% of the Sydney population (1,923,618 out of 4,391,674 - see http://profile.id.com.au/wsroc/population?WebID=200) currently living Western Sydney only compromising of 10% of current air travel demand it's a stretch to say that an airport is the infrastructure that Western Sydney "demands" or "needs". It will probably take a lot more population growth to achieve a higher share of demand in Western Sydney assuming propensity to travel remains constant over time. That of course will require a lot of other infrastructure first (e.g. roads, rail, hospitals) before something like an airport should be considered.

This of course raises the question as to whether we want more population growth in Western Sydney and/or in Sydney as a whole if it means we need to spend more money on infrastructure to accomodate it but that's another topic altogether.

What this does say however that this airport may be more to serve the passengers of Kingsford Smith; an asset that may be facing capacity constraints at present rather than serving passengers from the local community of Western Sydney.

Flight paths of each runway option

This post is simply an information dump from the EIS documents; which doesn't seem to be anywhere obvious on the web other than in PDF form on the Blacktown Council website. In quite a number of articles, forums and other websites information about the airport has been presented in a way that in my opinion is potentially misleading to the community. As an example a Daily Telegraph article titled “Badgerys Creek Flight Path will slience the critics” shows the ANEF maps of the airport rather than any proposed flight paths. People really want to know whether the planes will "fly over them"; this post attempts to show more information to address exactly that.

At present as shown in the 1997 EIS for the airport there are three options that are proposed for the runway alignment of the airport; with the first two options quite similar.

• Option A has the runways going NE/SW
• Option B is the same but with a longer northern runway
• Option C is a direct N/S runway configuration
  

Whatever option is decided of course will influence the final flight paths of the airport. Most newspaper articles assume that Option A will be selected from what I have seen. Indeed if we assume that the fact sheets published along with the airport announcement are true from the Government we can probably say that Option A is the only option available. This is because out of the options proposed this is the only one that does not require more acquisition of land.

"The site owned by the Australia Government is sufficient to support an initial airport development and further land acquisition is unlikely to be required. Any future decision to expand would require consultation between the Government, the airport owner and affected stakeholders."
Fact Sheet - Building an airport at Badgerys Creek

Of course we can note that before the election Warren Truss confirmed the airport was not on their radar either (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/just-dont-mention-a-second-airport-20130803-2r669.html). So I'm not sure whether we can trust the press release above. Furthermore the above words in the fact sheet seem like minister speak; the option is still open and no decisions have yet been made here. More interesting to note that when I attended the UWS airport forum a UWS staffer commented that Option C was more likely on the table since it would be funded by private enterprise and that they would prefer this configuration to line up with their other airport (i.e Kingsford Smith). While I don't have any information yet to suggest this is the case it does show there is no consensus of any part of the airport proposal yet including which runway alignment will be used.

The funny thing about all of this is that no matter which option is selected it really doesn't change much in terms of which areas will cop the most frequency of flights. Besides the obvious immediate areas near the airport Penrith and to a lesser extent Camden and Blacktown are situated within proposed flight paths. Below I've attached images of the flight paths as proposed by the 1997 EIS for both Option A and C to illustrate this. This of course debunks the myth that planes will simply continue flying north east and south west of the airport. It is interesting that at least for Option A that the flight paths turn back to fly over Sydney - in particular the Penrith area - when there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why they need to do so.

Option A: South-West Takeoff flight paths (Source: Draft EIS (1997) Second Sydney Airport VOLUME 1 Chpt 9)

Option A: North-East Takeoff flight paths (Source: Draft EIS (1997) Second Sydney Airport VOLUME 1 Chpt 9)

Option C: Northern Takeoff flight paths (Source: Draft EIS (1997) Second Sydney Airport VOLUME 1 Chpt 9)

So why are we interested in what the flight paths will be? For two reasons:

1. It allows us to determine where the community impacts will be felt including but not limited to aircraft noise and;
2. It also gives some possible explanation as to why local stakeholders either support or oppose the airport development. It is interesting to note that out of the surrounding councils Liverpool (and therefore unfortunately WSROC) are the main vocal supporters of the airport while Blacktown, Camden, Fairfield and potentially Penrith are opposed to it. This of course correlates to the flight paths above with the Liverpool area pretty much clear from most of it.

Both reasons above of course whole topics in themselves and if I have time will deal with in further blog posts. I thank Blacktown Council for hosting the EIS documents of the Badgerys Creek airport proposal on their website (see http://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au/Planning_and_Development/Strategic_Planning/Sydneys_Second_Airport_Draft_EIS_from_1997). It is interesting to note that a standard Google search does not show any proposals for flight paths at all at time of writing this post; hopefully posting them here makes it more accessible to people.

Reason for starting this blog - "a fair go for Western Sydney"

Up front: I'm commissioning this blog not to take state my political position but to present the facts around the airport and what it may suggest in terms of the impact of the airport and its viability. I will present the facts from a variety of different sources and present my analysis and opinion based on the information I have.

Now to the matter of this post. The article in particular that made me take the leap to start this blog was not one of the typical newspaper articles in the local Daily Telegraph who by the way are actively campaigning for the airport. It was instead this editorial from the SMH funnily enough titled "a fair go for western Sydney":

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/nsw-premier-mike-bairds-priority-a-fair-go-for-western-sydney-20140824-107klp.html

In response I considered writing a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald outlining my position which in a nutshell is this -

Without any information on flight paths, runway configuration, noise mitigation plans, etc. and without knowing the effect on local residents how can you say confidently that this will be good for the region?

I wrote the letter but didn't send it for many reasons. Some are:

• I work in a technical engineering based industry; one where your name means a lot including but not limited to your Google search results. Being against something right now could disadvantage myself and my family in the future.
• I think the message matters more than who I am; especially since I'm not sponsored by anyone nor working for anyone. I didn't think this was needed information.
• The letter even condensed breached their word limits by a slim margin.
• My letter was more to inspire the Herald to do some actual research rather than directly present information that in my opinion been selectively presented to support the airport (e.g. displayed runway layout (Option A in the EIS) in most newspaper articles does not elaborate that this isn't the final runway and that some people think other runway layouts are in fact more likely).

The letter is below. There is a lot more to cover; and some to elaborate on - remember this was condensed to try and send to a newspaper. Will do that in future blog posts.

"In your editorial on the 25th of August you correctly stated that many people choose Western Sydney for its quiet open spaces and family friendliness. You then go on and mention the "much needed" airport at Badgerys Creek. Without any definite information yet released on flight paths, airport design and so on how can the Herald confidently state that the proposed airport as a whole will be a "fair go for Western Sydney"?
Having recently attended the UWS Community forum on the airport proposal to get more information one major concern that kept being brought up by the audience was how this proposal would affect the quality of life of the local community. In particular it seems most of the Penrith and Camden area will likely be in the main flight paths if what they believed holds true. This will no doubt result in a lot of negatives locally including a lot less sleep for those aspirational working families you mentioned. In other words this proposal potentially threatens to jeopardise the qualities you mentioned make the area desirable. The job benefits also seemed questionable in light of the recent Qantas announcements of job cuts and losses from both local airlines.
I agree we need infrastructure investment; more rail and road, more investment into health, the arts and so on. An airport as it is proposed currently however is probably not on that list."