Complaint rates from Folsom and El Dorado Hills are wildly disproportionate to potential noise exposure when compared with metrics for other airports handling air carrier operations, especially when comparing generally similar circumstances.

The main case summarized here is comparison of noise complaints in each of two situations: Complaints from El Dorado Hills and Folsom about approach noise for air carrier cargo aircraft flying into Mather, and complaints from Foster City for air carrier aircraft of all types flying into San Francisco International Airport (SFO).  Other examples of serial noise complaint situations are noted later.

A nutshell summary comparison of noise complaint metrics:
Bar graphs are scaled to show the larger numeric value in each comparison at a fixed maximum width.
In this data sample EDH and Folsom generated noise complaints at a rate at least 864 times higher than Foster City, using the standard measure of complaints per thousand operations.

The data below for number of approaches per day to SFO uses a rounded estimate of 400 approaches per day.  Statistics for June 2008 show an average of 408 Air Carrier approaches per day. SFO handles about an additional 100 approaches per day for Air Taxi, Civil (General Aviation), and Military operations; however, the comparisons below refer only to Air Carrier data in order to address only the same types of aircraft involvind in EDH/Folsom noise complaints.

Average maximum noise per approach (Lmax)	EDH & Folsom	65 dB
	Foster City	71 dB
Average number of approaches per day (Foster City count is approximate)	EDH & Folsom	6
	Foster City	400
Total number of approaches, first 7 months of year	EDH & Folsom	1,272
	Foster City	88,839
Number of noise complaints, first 7 months of year	EDH & Folsom	2,441
	Foster City	197
Noise complaint rate: Complaints per thousand approaches, first 7 months of year	EDH &Folsom	1,919
	Foster City	2 [2.22]

EDH and Folsom generated noise complaints at a rate 864 times higher than Foster City. The complaint rate is wildly beyond even that of major airports that also have serial complainers.

Here are additional comparisons with other airports whose noise complaint rate statistics are easily available through Google searches. Availability tends to be highest for airports with high nu mbers of complaints due to serial complainers. Where a choice of date coverage was available from the web sources this table shows the most recent samples. Where data on the web identified counts due to serial complainers the table uses color highlighting for counts with and without serial complainers included.

Airport	Year	Complaints per thousand operations
Mather	2008 Jan-July	1,919
East Midlands, England	2004	36
Scottsdale	2008 Q1&Q2	16
Bristol, England	2004	9
Manchester	2004	7
St. Petersburg (Tampa) total complaints, including one serial complainer	2007	6.8
Oakland Not complaints:  Actual rate of noise noncompliance, from Airport Noise and Operations Monitoring System (violations are near airport, complaint data not on web)	2008 Q1	6.4
Los Angeles International total complaints, including one serial complainer	2008 July	4.9
San Francisco International	2008	2.2
Los Angeles International in an earlier year, Stage 2 aircraft still in service	ca 1998	1.5
Chicago O'Hare	2007	1.3
Long Beach in an earlier year, Stage 2 aircraft still in service	ca 1998	1.3
St. Petersburg (Tampa) complaints, excluding one serial complainer	2007	1.2
Melbourne, Australia	1999	0.8
Los Angeles International complaints, excluding one serial complainer	2008 July	0.78
Phoenix Sky Harbor	2008 April	0.67
London City, England	2004	0.5

Here's an example of how just one serial complainer dominates complaint statistics, making them more of a reflection of the complainer than of any actual factual basis for the complaint. This is from LAX (Los Angeles International) complaint statistics for July 2008, when one household reported 233 of 277 complaints from a location that has very little if any exposure to aircraft noise.





Monterey Park is about 20 miles east of LAX, 5 miles north of the straight-in approach path for traffic arriving from the east, at least 5 miles east of traffic arriving from the west and turning base over or west of downtown L.A., and about 5 miles south of infrequent departures toward the east. The infrequent departures are at about 15,000 feet when they pass Monterey Park.

Click on this icon to see a larger image of LAX flight tracks, with Monterey Park labeled on the map.



Local complainers' home locations are in low noise areas.

The map below shows home locations of the most frequent and most vocal noise complainers in Folsom, El Dorado Hills, and Shingle Springs with yellow dots. One is barely within 1 mile of the approach path, no closer than 0.9 mile. All others are at least 1.1 miles from the approach. Three are so far away that ILS approaches normally would be inaudible, or in one case sometimes barely audible.

The blue lines marke a distance of 1 mile one either side of the approach path. At this side-distance in El Dorado Hills noise from jets on the ILS glide slope is near the limit of audibility with typical ambient background noise.  At locations with very low ambient noise jet noise is barely audible to human hearing at about 1.5 miles but cannot be distinguished from ambient noise by a sound level meter.

In this writer's contacts with homeowners those living directly below the approach path report no jet noise problem. The southwestern red dot on the map below marks the point of maximum noise exposure in El Dorado Hills, directly under the ILS approach on the west ridge. In multiple talks with 3 homeowners (out of 4) at this point all report no jet noise problem. The northeast red dot is the El Dorado Hills Community Services District, where the General Manager says he does not hear jet flyovers from his office. Additional contacts with a number of homeowners who say they live directly below the ILS approach in EDH and in Folsom have to date produced unanimous reports of no jet noise problem.

All frequent noise complainers whose home locations are known are at least 1.1 mile away from the approach path. Some are far enough away to make jet noise on the ILS approach inaudible at their homes.

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2008 Complaint Update: EDH & Folsom complainted complaint count by month Part of this (several hundred complaints per month) correlated with Sacramento International flights, even though Folsom and EDH have far less noise exposure to them than parts of Sacramento that logged only about 1% to 5% as many complaints

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	2008
MHR Correlated:  EDH	265	324	127	139	91	43	4	91	196	162	131	58	1,631
MHR Correlated:  Folsom	615	479	493	634	435	434	40	534	484	557	377	499	6,414
Total MHR Correlated:  EDH+Folsom+Rescue+Shingle Springs	909	813	640	791	553	483	42	637	691	723	508	558	7,448
Total MHR Correlated:  Mather+Rancho Cordova+Gold River	1	2	7	1	0	0	0	0	6	4	1	0	22
Total MHR Correlated:  All areas, combined, except EDH, Folsom,...	15	11	18	15	14	7	18	3	17	16	4	8	146
Total SMF Correlated:  EDH+Folsom+Shingle Springs	392	431	198	217	250	52	44	81	254	190	246	106	2,461
Total SMF Correlated:  All other areas, combined	16	20	17	21	24	11	20	14	9	12	20	7	191

A limited amount of research and news information is available on the subject of serial complainers and disparity between perception and reality of aircraft noise. Here are three sources:

• Academic research from Manchester, England reported sample of annual noise reports for two years with 41% and 45%, respectively produced by three men. One even testified in a public meeting that he favored building a new runway to support his compulsion to complain. (Reference: The Influence of Serial-Complainers on Complaint Profiles at Airports
   
• Academic research in the Netherlands on recognizes that public dialog shapes human perception of noise: "If policy treats a situation as problematic, people will experience the situation as problematic." Reference: Policy and perception: How policy discourses shape the perception of aircraft noise
   
• An example of disproportionat serial noise complaints came from Tampa news in March, 2008. The news cited a dramatic increase in noise complaints for Tampa International Airport:  179 in 2005, 256 in 2006, 1,278 in 2007. The increase came from one man, who now submits 83% of Tampa's noise complaints. (Reference: Tampa man keeps an ear to the sky to fight airport noise)

MHR noise complaints for 2007 are shown in the table below for complaints from El Dorado Hills and Folsom. Nearly all complaints for Mather traffic are from El Dorado Hills and Folsom. Monthly statistics for noise complaints usually show all local noise reports originating from a total of 7 callers in El Dorado Hills and 7 callers in Folsom. Some characteristics of the data suggest that the number of high-volume complainers could be as low as 3 in Folsom and 1 or 2 in El Dorado Hills.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Total, Jan - Jul
El Dorado Hills:	129	99	133	115	79	63	70	688
Folsom:	230	253	264	280	291	227	208	1,753
EDH + Folsom:	359	352	397	395	370	290	278	2,441

The San Francisco International Noise Abatement Office reported in a phone conversation on July 31, 2008 that noise measurements at their permanent monitoring site  in Foster City showed maximum sound levels (Lmax) averaging about 71 dB, 6 dB higher than found in the 2006 measurements for freighter approaches over El Dorado Hills, and that Foster City had produced 197 noise complaints in the first 7 months of 2008, from the start of the year through July 31st.