Does your airport have a curfew? Every airport page now answers

Whether an airport has a night curfew is one of the first things people ask when they look at a home near a flight path. It decides whether you can expect quiet nights or aircraft at 2 AM. Until now the answer on Flight Path Noise sat in each airport’s FAQ, further down the page. Today every airport page answers it directly, near the top.

Where to find the curfew answer

Open any airport page and scroll just past the live statistics. A new section asks the question in plain words, for example “Does Sydney Airport have a curfew?”, and answers it in one line before a short explanation. You can also jump to it from the “Curfew” entry in the page contents.

How we decide between yes, partial and no

We use three answers because night rules vary a lot from airport to airport, and a simple yes or no would mislead in many cases.

• Yes means night operations are banned for a set window, apart from a small number of exempt movements. Sydney has a strict 11 PM to 6 AM curfew set in federal law. London City closes from about 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM on weekdays and almost entirely at weekends, and Frankfurt has a mandatory curfew from 11 PM to 6 AM.
• Partial means there is no full ban, but night flights are capped or limited. Heathrow has no curfew, yet its night period of roughly 11:30 PM to 6 AM is tightly controlled by a movement cap and a noise-quota system, so only the quietest aircraft may operate. Wellington restricts operations from 1 AM to 6 AM with exceptions for delayed and medical flights, and Moorabbin bans training flights overnight but stays open for other traffic.
• No means there is no mandatory restriction. Atlanta runs 24 hours, and its night-time noise procedures are voluntary. Valencia and Penang also have no formal curfew, even though overnight traffic at both is light.

Voluntary noise-abatement schemes are counted as no, because they ask airlines to avoid night flights without stopping them. Quotas and movement caps are counted as partial, because they limit night traffic without ending it.

What the numbers look like across the network

Across all 129 airports we cover, 29 have a curfew, 15 have partial night restrictions and 85 have no curfew. The answers were drawn from each airport’s own guide and checked one by one. Where a well-known restriction turned out to apply to something other than flights, we say so. Atlanta’s answer, for example, explains that an often-quoted overnight restriction there refers to terminal access, not to aircraft.

Using the curfew answer with the map

A curfew tells you what the rules allow. The map shows what actually happens. If you’re weighing up a street near an airport with no curfew, drop a pin on the address and look at the hourly breakdown in the pin report. It shows how many flights pass nearby in each hour of the day, so you can see whether late-night traffic is a handful of cargo flights or a steady stream.

The same goes for partial answers. At airports with night quotas, the hours either side of the restricted window are often the busiest of the day, and the hourly breakdown makes that easy to spot. At airports with a curfew, it shows how early traffic starts in the morning and how late it runs in the evening.

We started with five airports yesterday, Sydney, Heathrow, Valencia, Penang and Atlanta, and today the curfew section is live on all 129.