A new look for Flight Path Noise

Flight Path Noise looks different today. We’ve redesigned the homepage, every airport page and every suburb page, with new typography, a new colour system and new drawings. The information on each page and the addresses of pages are the same as before, so your bookmarks still work.

A homepage that starts with the whole network

The homepage still opens with the globe, and on larger screens it now shows day and night as they fall across the world in real time. Click any airport on it to open that airport’s map.

Below the globe, “Busiest airports this month” lists the airports with the most tracked flights a day over the last 30 days, two per country at most, with each one’s curfew status at a glance. A new section introduces the suburb guides, all 356 of them across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, San Diego and Gatwick, with the top-ranked suburbs listed and a link to browse each city. The full list of 173 airports, with its region tabs, is still further down.

Airport pages with key facts up front

Each airport page now starts with a header row of key facts, including the airport’s codes, the local time, the coverage radius, average flights a day and the curfew hours where there are any. The contents bar under it jumps to each section, from the map and statistics to the curfew answer, neighbourhoods and FAQ.

The map itself works as before. Layers, filters, address search, pins and pin comparison are all in the same places, grouped in a panel beside the map.

Runway drawings and downloadable runway maps

Every one of the 173 airports now has a plan-view drawing of its runways, drawn from OpenStreetMap data. You’ll find it in the “Flight patterns and runway use” section of each airport page, next to the written explanation of which runways are used and when. Seeing the runway layout makes the flight paths on the map much easier to follow, especially at airports with crossing or parallel runways.

You can also download each runway drawing as a high-resolution map. Look for “Download map” at the top of the runway drawing and choose light or dark. Each one is a 2400 by 2400 pixel WebP image, large enough to print or zoom into. The maps carry a credit for Flight Path Noise and for the OpenStreetMap contributors whose data they are drawn from.

Street-plan drawings and suburb search

Each airport page also has a street-plan drawing of a real neighbourhood near the airport, behind the section on checking noise at a specific address. On the Sydney page it’s the streets of Dulwich Hill in the inner west. Suburb pages such as Marrickville share the same design.

Search in the menu bar now finds suburbs as well as airports. Type “Marrickville”, “Horsham” or “Golden Hill” and the suburb page appears in its own group under the matching airports.

Correct local hours all year

Hourly figures on airport pages and in pin reports are now worked out in each airport’s own time zone, including daylight-saving changes. Before this, each airport used a fixed offset from UTC, so during daylight saving some hourly figures could be an hour out, and airports in half-hour time zones were approximated. Both now line up with the local clock.

Privacy policy and terms

We’ve also published a privacy policy and terms of use, linked from the footer of every page. The methodology page has a new section on citing our data, for anyone taking the numbers to a council, a community forum or a planning meeting.