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Posted: 2024-08-15 03:59:54

A plan for new Brisbane flight paths is aiming to "share" the noise over more of the city.

Airservices Australia has released five flight path options to curb noise pollution by spreading it over more suburbs so it's less concentrated in some. 

Local resident, Gail Scarlett, has barely had a lie-in since the Brisbane Airport added its new runway in 2020.

A plane flies through a cloudy sky, the deck of an apartment in the foreground.

Brisbane Airport added a new runway in 2020. (ABC News: Alice Pavlovic)

Unlike Sydney and London's Heathrow, Brisbane doesn't have a flight curfew.

The first day the second runway opened it felt like a plane was flying through her bedroom, Ms Scarlett said.

"Sleep is disrupted. Our conversations are disrupted. They're very low over our house and over our backyard," Ms Scarlett, who has lived at Hendra for 27 years, said. 

"We shouldn't have to put up with flights every two minutes. It interrupts daily life."

A commercial jet flies though a cloudy sky.

The flight path changes are proposed under Brisbane Airport's "noise action plan". (ABC News: Alice Pavlovic)

The flight path changes are proposed under Airservices Australia's "noise action plan". 

These are "essentially about sharing aircraft noise", Airservices Australia said.

"While some community members agree that noise-sharing is a fair solution to managing aircraft noise, we have also heard that noise-sharing is not the preferred option for many residents," it said in a statement today. 

Selected current arrivals (orange flight paths) and departures (pink flight paths).

These five slight paths are the focus of the new proposals.(Supplied: Airservices Australia)

"However, investigating options to share noise is a key deliverable of the Noise Action Plan for Brisbane to reduce the impacts of aircraft noise for thousands of residents, within the constraints of Brisbane's current airspace design."

An independent report on the city's flight paths, commissioned by Airservices Australia, recommended reducing the frequency and concentration of flights over the city and outer suburbs with alternate routes, and more flights over bayside waters. 

The airways regulator said today it was not "physically possible" for all flights to arrive and depart over the waters of Moreton Bay, as some people have advocated. 

"Aircraft must take off and land into the wind; this means that approximately half of all flights will be over the water while the other half will be over land. 

"As such, we cannot remove all aircraft operations from all communities."

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