What It Sounds Like

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) judged whether the noise from the new flight paths was significant mainly by one measure: DNL, the day-night average sound level, averaged across an entire year.¹ By that measure, it found the increases below its threshold of significance. The proposed rule itself never mentions noise, or the people who live under the flight paths.²

This page is what monitors outside six homes actually recorded between February and September 2026. Every figure comes from our Six Homes Flight Noise Record of September 30, 2026, which we filed with the FAA as part of our comment.³

The yardstick, and what it leaves out

DNL takes every second of sound over 24 hours, adds a 10-decibel penalty to anything between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and averages the lot. Then it averages that across a year. The FAA calls a change significant only when it raises DNL by 1.5 decibels or more in an area that is, or as a result becomes, exposed to 65 decibels DNL or more.

That threshold decided the question here. The FAA modeled the January 2026 flight-path changes and found increases of 5 decibels or more in parts of Palm Beach. It labels those increases reportable but not significant, because those areas stay in the 45-to-60-decibel range, below 65.⁴ The size of the increase did not settle it. The 65-decibel line did.

An annual average makes it possible to compare noise from place to place. It does not tell you what a particular night sounds like. It cannot show how many aircraft passed, how loud any one of them was, what time it happened, or whether it woke you, and those are the things residents live with. Three of them can be measured, and we measured them.

1. The nights

The FAA’s own night runs from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.: those are the hours it penalizes by 10 decibels when it computes DNL. In the busy season, a typical night brought 12 to 13 aircraft at 65 decibels or louder at five of the six homes, and 9 or 10 at the Everglades Island home, whose monitor started in late April. In the summer, the airport’s quieter season, a typical night brought 7 to 10. At every home, every busy-season night measured had at least one; in the summer, at least 95% of nights did.⁵

Aircraft at 65 A-weighted decibels or louder (the loudest one-second average of each event), measured outdoors. A night counts only if the monitor recorded at least 90% of it, which is why the number of nights differs. The four West Palm Beach monitors started on April 3, so their busy season is April alone. Summer is the airport’s quieter season.⁶

Most of these aircraft were louder still. Counted at 70 decibels or louder, a typical busy-season night brought 10 to 12 aircraft at four of the six homes, and the worst night brought 31, at the Estate Section home on March 12. Every one of them was at least twice as loud as the World Health Organization’s guideline for a single noise event outside a bedroom at night, and measuring the way the WHO does would not narrow that gap.⁷

The worst nights

The worst night at the Estate Section home was Thursday, March 12. Between 10 p.m. and midnight, 20 arrivals came in over the roof, an average of one every six minutes; seven more followed between midnight and 3 a.m., and nine departures between 6 and 7 a.m. That is thirty-six aircraft in nine hours, every one identified by its transponder. At three homes, in Prospect Park, on Everglades Island and in Historic El Cid, the worst night was the same one, Sunday, July 19: 26 aircraft at the Prospect Park home, 25 at the Everglades Island home and 24 at the Historic El Cid home. Most came between 10 p.m. and midnight, then a business jet at 12:23 a.m. and the departures from 5:41 a.m.⁸

Narrow the hours and the flights are still there

Most of the FAA night’s traffic comes in the late evening and the 6 a.m. departure wave. But at five of the six homes, at least one aircraft at 65 decibels or louder was recorded between midnight and 6 a.m. on three nights in four or more; at the Flamingo Park home, on 61% of nights. Between midnight and 5 a.m., the middle of the night, it happened on 27% to 47% of nights.⁵

The last column counts identified aircraft at 70 decibels or louder between 1 and 5 a.m. over each home’s whole record.

One flight, six homes

The deep-night flights are not a local effect of one address. United Airlines UA 1395, a departure from Palm Beach to Newark, was recorded at about 1:52 a.m. on Friday, August 21, at 70 decibels or louder at all six homes: 82.7 decibels at the Prospect Park home, 82.2 at the Everglades Island home, 79.4 at the Historic El Cid home, 79.0 at the Estate Section home, 77.0 at the Poinciana Park home and 72.7 at the Flamingo Park home. For context, the World Health Organization’s 1999 guidance gives 60 decibels outside bedrooms for a single night-time event, assuming a partly open window, measured as a maximum that reads at or above the one-second averages reported here. At 82.7 decibels, the loudest of those readings was nearly five times as loud as that level. We count aircraft, not awakenings.⁹ A list of the loudest deep-night flights, updated nightly, is on pbinoise.com.

2. The busiest hours: 24 or 25 aircraft

At every home, the busiest hour in its record brought 24 or 25 separate aircraft, about one every two and a half minutes, all identified from their transponders. At three homes it was the same hour: a morning departure wave between 10 and 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 19, with 25 aircraft at the Poinciana Park and Historic El Cid homes and 24 at the Everglades Island home. That day was windy.¹⁰

An annual average includes that hour’s sound energy, but it cannot show that 25 aircraft passed within it: the hour is one of 8,760 in the year.

3. Forty minutes to an hour a day above 65 decibels

“Time above 65” counts the seconds in a day when sound attributed to aircraft was at 65 decibels or louder, about the level of normal conversation. In the busy season, a typical day at five of the homes brought 40 to 59 minutes of it. By August, the quiet season, a typical day brought 18 to 28 minutes.¹¹

“Typical” is the median day. The Everglades Island monitor began recording on April 22, so it is not among the five.

4. How loud these aircraft are

The night counts above use each event’s loudest one-second average. The loudest events are ranked by the recorded maximum, which for a flyover reads about the same or slightly higher. At each home, the airliners among its ten loudest events sit in a narrow band: from about 82 to 84.5 decibels at the Flamingo Park home to about 86 to 89 at the Poinciana Park home. On the rule of thumb that every 10 decibels sounds about twice as loud, that is roughly three to five times as loud as 65 decibels. The single loudest event at each home ranged from 85.8 to 91.3 decibels.¹² For scale, the National Institutes of Health puts normal conversation at 60 to 70 decibels and motorcycles at 80 to 110.¹³

One flight is not in these figures. On June 17, 2026, the Everglades Island monitor recorded 102.7 decibels as a jet passed. Residents who ran outside saw a fighter jet, and a senior airport official told us he believed it was a military aircraft. No flight-tracking record identifies it, so the record does not rank or count it, and we list it separately from airline traffic, which it does not represent.¹⁴

5. Before and after, at the two Palm Beach homes

We have no recordings from before October 2025. At the two Palm Beach homes, where the arrival path moved, we compared each measured flight with the same aircraft modelled on the old path. Under that model, a typical arrival is now 12.6 decibels louder at the Estate Section home and 10.4 decibels louder at the Everglades Island home: about 2.4 times and about twice as loud. On the old path, the model puts almost no arrival at 75 decibels or more; today about two in three measure that loud at the Estate Section home, and more than half at the Everglades Island home. Departures always crossed near both homes; for them the modelled change is smaller, about 4 decibels. These are model estimates, not measurements.¹⁵

What these numbers do and do not say

• Six homes, six microphones. These are measurements at six single points outdoors. They do not describe whole neighborhoods, and they count aircraft, not awakenings.
• Software decides which sounds are aircraft. It matches the sound to aircraft transponder tracks. Aircraft-shaped sound that could not be matched to a flight is not counted in any aircraft figure.
• Some days are left out: days of documented instrument faults, and days meeting a declared screen for unusual local noise. The record lists every one.
• Maximum levels were not all recorded the same way. At two homes, for part of the record, maxima were recorded with a faster time setting that tends to read slightly higher. Night counts and daily figures use one-second averages, which that setting does not affect.
• A known disagreement with the airport’s own monitors. Compared day by day with the nearest airport station, our total sound levels agree to within about 2 decibels, but our aircraft-only figures run 1.1 to 3.9 decibels higher. Different rules for deciding which sound counts as aircraft are one possible explanation; we have not resolved it.¹⁶
• These readings describe conditions now. We have no monitor readings from before October 2025 to compare them with; the change in the flight paths is documented by the flight-track records, not by these meters. 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.

If you live under these paths, sign up for updates: we will tell you when the FAA acts, and when your own account of what you hear can make a difference again.

How we measure

• The monitors. At each home, a Convergence Instruments NSRTW_mk4 sound-level meter at a fixed outdoor position, installed and maintained by residents, recording A-weighted sound every second. This is an independent community monitoring program; it does not claim to be a certified airport noise program, and no field calibration is asserted. Each instrument’s calibration certificate is listed in the record.
• What the decibel figures are. Night counts and time above 65 use the loudest one-second A-weighted average during each event (L_Aeq,1s), measured outdoors. The loudest events are ranked by the recorded maximum (L_Amax), which for a flyover is usually within about a decibel of that average, or about 1.5 decibels higher with the faster time setting. Neither is DNL, which is an annual average; the two are not comparable and this page does not compare them.
• What counts as an event. A sustained rise above the location’s own running background level, ending when the level falls back.
• Which events count as aircraft. An event counts only when it has been matched to a flight whose track was measured against that home’s position. A match that relies on a neighboring monitor counts only if the timing, the shape of the sound and the trajectory all fit at that home. The association is made by software; it is not a unique identification of the aircraft.
• Matching to aircraft. Position data come from three sources: FlightAware, Flightradar24, and a local receiving antenna in Palm Beach. The three overlap; they fill one another’s gaps and are not independent confirmation.
• What we exclude. Non-aircraft impulses that fall inside an event window (a slammed gate, a thunderclap, construction) are screened out by the shape of the sound and withheld from the peak and night figures.
• Counting nights and flights. A night is named for the evening it begins, in Eastern time, and is counted only if the monitor recorded at least 90% of it. Events from the same aircraft within 15 minutes count as one.
• Which version. All events were reprocessed on September 29–30, 2026 under our published methods (version 1.5). Figures published on this page before October 2026 used earlier processing and are superseded.

Daily readings are published at pbinoise.com. The full record, with every exclusion and caveat, is the Six Homes Flight Noise Record (PDF); each home also has its own record in the FAA’s docket. We share the underlying data with the FAA, researchers and reporters on request: info@palmbeachquietskies.org, or media@palmbeachquietskies.org for press inquiries.