Officials Hope To Reduce Noise Pollution At BWI

HANOVER, MD — Local officials are aiming to reduce aircraft noise at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport. Residents across Anne Arundel County, Howard County and Baltimore have lodged complaints with BWI about the noise generated from air traffic. According to the Maryland Department of Transportation quarterly noise report, BWI received 1,000 noise complaints a day and more than 120,000 noise complaints overall from April to June in 2019.

The BWI Community Roundtable recently approved potential solutions to items that have been identified as needing to be addressed. The Maryland Aviation Administration has forwarded the information to the Federal Aviation Administration for review.

A federal performance-based navigation working group within the FAA changes airspace design at airports every couple of years using its own analysis and tests for best practices. But the BWI Community Roundtable group hopes the FAA will instead use its proposals. Some of the proposed solutions include expanding flight paths to less densely populated areas, requiring planes to fly at higher altitudes for longer periods of time and spreading air traffic noise across a larger area instead of using specific repeated flight paths.

“It’s one baby step in the right direction in a very long road,” Barabara Deckert, the roundtable’s communications coordinator, told the Baltimore Sun.

Elected officials and volunteer representatives from Anne Arundel County, Howard County and Baltimore comprise the roundtable's membership. They have been working closely with the MAA and Southwest Airlines, the major carrier at BWI, to hash out ways to address the noise concerns raised at the airport.