What It Sounds Like

The short version

The FAA’s proposal does not mention noise or residents.¹ The FAA did model the January 2026 flight-path changes, and its own model found noise increases of 5 decibels or more in parts of Palm Beach; it judged them not significant under its threshold.² Modeling is the FAA’s method. The monitors show what was measured on the ground. So residents installed six sound-level meters under the flight paths, in Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, and matched each noise event to the aircraft passing over at the time.³ The restriction has applied every day since October 20, 2025, whether or not the President is in residence, so the monitors run every day too.

The nights. Over 90 summer nights, aircraft noise was recorded between midnight and 6 a.m. on 84 of them, and on 77 of them at least one aircraft passed at 65 decibels or louder (926 such events across the six monitors), and several hundred more events fell between 10 p.m. and midnight in each neighborhood. Summer is the airport’s quieter season.⁴⁵ These readings describe conditions now. We have no monitor readings from before October 2025 to compare them with; the change is documented by the flight-path records, not by these meters.

The days. In the busiest hours an aircraft passes about every two minutes, and aircraft noise is audible above the neighborhood’s background for around a fifth of the hour; in the hour with the most minutes of aircraft noise, a different hour from the busiest, 41%, or 25 of the 60 minutes.⁶

How loud. A typical overnight event peaks in the high 60s to mid 70s in decibels, measured outdoors; the loudest overnight events reach the low 80s, and the loudest airline events at any hour the high 80s. Ordinary conversation is about 60.⁷⁸

If you live under these paths, your own account of what you hear, and when, belongs in the FAA’s public comment file alongside these measurements. Write your comment before October 2.

For the record

The nights, by neighborhood (June 14 – September 11, 2026)

Four of the six monitors were offline for part of the period, which is why the last column’s denominators differ. The 84-of-90 figure counts a night if any monitor recorded an event between midnight and 6 a.m. The bands are the ones we publish daily; the FAA’s own night-time period for its average-noise metric runs from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., so the 6–7 a.m. hour is not in this table.

The days

The busiest single hour recorded at any monitor held 29 separate aircraft, at the Estate Section monitor on the afternoon of March 20, 2026. Across the network the busiest hours run between 24 and 29 aircraft. In those hours the time spent inside an aircraft noise event is typically 17–22% of the hour; the highest recorded is 41.4% of a single hour (the Estate Section monitor, May 9, 2026, noon to 1 p.m.), about 25 of the 60 minutes.

Levels

All monitor readings on this page are peak one-second A-weighted sound levels (dBA) recorded outdoors at the monitor during the event; the FAA’s modeled figures quoted above are a different measure. Median overnight peaks by neighborhood run from 68 to 75 dBA; the loudest overnight event recorded is 83 dBA. The loudest events at any hour reach the high 80s. One military flight over Everglades Island on June 17, 2026 exceeded 100 dBA; it is listed separately from airline traffic because it is not representative of it.

How we measure

• The monitors. Six Convergence Instruments NSRTW-mk4 sound-level meters at fixed outdoor locations, installed and maintained by residents, recording A-weighted sound levels every second while in service.
• What counts as an event. An event is a sustained rise of at least 3 decibels above the location’s own running background level, measured second by second, and it ends when the level falls back toward that background. “Audible above background” on this page means that measured exceedance, not a listening test. We also compute each event with the background energy subtracted, so the aircraft’s own contribution can be reported separately from the neighborhood’s baseline; at the levels quoted here the two agree to within a decibel.
• Matching to aircraft. Events are matched to specific aircraft using position data from three sources: FlightAware, Flightradar24, and a local ADS-B receiver operated by a resident. The three overlap; they are used to fill one another’s gaps, not as independent confirmation.
• What we exclude. Non-aircraft impulses that fall inside an event window (a slammed gate, a thunderclap, construction) are screened out by their acoustic shape and withheld from our loudest-event lists, because ranking by maximum would otherwise select for them.
• What we do not claim. These are measurements at six points, not a model of the whole area, and they do not by themselves establish what any individual household experiences.

Daily readings are published at pbinoise.com. The data and method will be filed in the FAA’s docket before the comment period closes; until then we will share them with the FAA, researchers and reporters on request: info@palmbeachquietskies.org, or media@palmbeachquietskies.org for press enquiries.