Live aircraft noise heatmaps for major airports worldwide

What this site is for

Moving near an airport shouldn't be a guessing game. Real-estate listings rarely mention aircraft noise, and the airport authority's official "noise contours" are usually averaged annual maps that hide the realities of a specific street under an approach corridor at 7 AM.

Flight Path Noise tracks every ADS-B-equipped aircraft passing over a covered airport, calculates an estimated noise level at ground based on aircraft type and altitude, and projects the cumulative result onto a heatmap you can search by address. The data is live — updated every 15 seconds — and history goes back to whenever each airport was added (typically a rolling 30 days, growing as the project does).

It's free, ad-free, and independent — no airport authority, no real-estate company, no airline involvement. Just a tool I (Luke) wanted to exist when I was apartment-hunting near a flight path.

How it works

Where the data comes from

Aircraft positions are pulled from multiple independent ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) networks, merged in real time, deduplicated by aircraft transponder ID, and written to a per-airport database. At commercial airports ADS-B coverage is essentially 100% of fixed-wing jet traffic. At general-aviation airports like Moorabbin or Essendon, coverage is closer to 30–50% because many older training aircraft fly without ADS-B-Out transponders.

How loudness is calculated

Each aircraft is classified by ICAO type code (A320, B789, EC35, etc.) and assigned a source noise level in decibels at a reference distance, drawn from FAA and EASA aircraft noise certification tables. That source level is then attenuated by inverse-square distance using the aircraft's barometric altitude and slant range from each grid cell on the ground. The result is a per-cell sound exposure that aggregates over the rolling window — so the heatmap shows you not just where loud planes have been overhead, but how often.

It's a model, not a microphone array. Real ground-level noise depends on wind, temperature, terrain, building absorption, and engine thrust setting at the moment of the flyover. But the model is consistent across airports and good enough to rank-order neighborhoods by exposure.

What you can do with the map

• Drop a pin on any address in the coverage radius. You'll get a per-address noise report: average daily Leq, peak observed dB, flights per day passing within 2 km, and an hourly breakdown.
• Toggle the heatmap layer to see cumulative noise (orange/red = louder).
• Toggle the route-density layer to see cumulative flight tracks (purple/magenta = busier corridors). This makes runway alignment and approach paths obvious.
• Filter by time of day, day of week, or aircraft type to surface specific patterns — overnight freight, weekend training flights, peak commercial banks.
• Watch live aircraft as they fly overhead, color-coded by altitude above ground level, with smooth interpolation between data points.