Community Reactions to Air Force Noise. Part II: Data on Community Studies and their Interpretation

Abstract
To determine preliminary relationships between variations in acoustic situations and disturbance, annoyance, and complaint potentials, personal interviews were held with almost 2500 residents at different air bases. The detailed acoustic conditions at three of these bases were measured. From these studies, the instruments and procedures for assessing neighborhood reactions have been fully developed, pretested, and validated. The data has provided valuable findings and the development of prototype statistical models for estimating neighborhood disturbance, annoyance, and complaint readiness. Community reactions are directly related to the intensity of the noise levels. A person is more disturbed, annoyed, and ready to complain if he is fearful of crashes and feels the air base is less important to local welfare and is less considerate of neighborhood feelings. Greatly disturbed people are also less satisfied with general living conditions in their areas, are more sensitive to noise of cars and trucks, and have less experience with flying. Time by itself has been proved no automatic cure of the annoyance problem. People who have lived near air bases longer are even more bothered by the airplane noise.

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