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Our studies of the North Runway departure routes

NRTG has published two studies that measure what the North Runway departure routes mean for the people beneath them. Both are open. The methods, data sources and results are published with permanent identifiers on Zenodo under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0), so anyone can check them, reuse them or show us where they are wrong.

Study 1: who is overflown

Quantifying Noise Impact of Dublin Airport’s North Runway Departure Routes: An EIA-Conformance Gap Analysis. Version 1.0, April 2026. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19567671

The study compares the routes flown today with two routes consistent with the Environmental Impact Statement on which the North Runway was permitted in 2007. It uses SID-compliance corridors constructed around published centrelines, widened from the runway to a 1.5 km “overflown” half-width, chosen to match the UK DfT track-keeping swathe (DfT00393), and a 3 km “affected” half-width, the study’s own working definition. Buildings come from OpenStreetMap and population from 2022 CSO Small Area data.

  • Within 1.5 km each side of the track, the routes flown today newly overfly an estimated 13,923 residents in 4,008 buildings who were not overflown in three decades of operations on the old main runway (28L).
  • Routes consistent with the Environmental Impact Statement would newly overfly 998 residents in 330 buildings, about 13 times fewer.
  • Within 3 km each side of the track, the routes flown today newly affect 30,186 residents in 8,761 buildings, against 1,164 residents in 447 buildings on routes consistent with the Environmental Impact Statement.
  • Each route consistent with the Environmental Impact Statement can be flown at a standard 15 degree bank and 250 knots. The study found no geometric or procedure-design reason that rules them out.

The study does not decide whether the routes comply with the planning permission or with EU law. It does not model long-term average noise (Lden, Lnight), and it does not validate the alternatives operationally (air traffic control, separation, airspace).

Study 2: how loud each flight is

Quantifying single-event aircraft noise: a calibrated LAmax model for Dublin Airport North Runway departures. Version 1.1, June 2026. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20680903

Public discussion of airport noise mostly uses long-term averages. Averages hide the peak level of each flight, which is what residents actually hear. This study models the peak level (LAmax) of each departure by aircraft type. It is calibrated on 364,831 noise-monitor events that daa released under access to information request AIE 2611, covering March 2025 to February 2026. The model reproduces the measured peaks to within about 2 dB, from 300 m to 2,600 m from the aircraft.

  • At Kilcoskan National School, daa’s own monitor records a median peak of 74.6 dBA, with 92% of events above 70 dBA and 167 events per day.
  • The school is directly under the northern departures flown today, and about 2.5 km from the nearest route the Environmental Impact Statement assessed.

Our own work, open to challenge

Both studies are NRTG’s own work, published as preprints. They have not been peer reviewed. We publish the methods and data so that daa, the regulators or anyone else can test them. If a figure is wrong, we want to know, and we will publish a corrected version.

 

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