want to turn aircraft onto their route to their destination as soon as possible after take off. They also don't want to climb quickly on full throttle either though climbing more quickly reduces noise impact at ground level. Why? Because turning later or climbing faster use more fuel and affect costs and profitability, especially for fully laden holiday charter flights which need to work harder to take off and climb.

The government expects airports to route planes over the least populated areas. Newcastle Airport has a westerly route that is sparsely populated but does not use it to share the noise and reduce its impact.

Monitoring aircraft noise

Newcastle Airport, like other airports, monitors the noise it creates. Newcastle has contracted this out to an external contractor so that there is no conflict of interest (we thought there was - we were wrong and we apologise). The contractor provides the Airport with reports and information derived from the data collected.

However, we think detailed aircraft noise data for each flight should be publicly available as well as summary report so everybody can see exactly what is going on. Also, the official analytics that airports use to check how much noise they are making, average noise across chunks of time. This means that the noisy flight that wakes you up at 6 in the morning, for example, is smoothed out. We think, as do many others, that this is something else that needs to change.