Lives aren't ruined by airport noise. The housing price around major airports is lower than it otherwise would be, but still higher than housing even further away from the city requiring a longer commute.
From personal experience I know that hearing planes take off every couple of minutes while you are having a BBQ doesn't ruin your day either. I know quite a number of people, including close family members, who voluntarily moved close to the airport for financial reasons. It's not for everyone, especially when night starts and landings are allowed (hich luckily isn't the case at most airports in Germany), but many people really aren't affected negatively.
Also, modern windows etc. can eliminate the noise almost entirely when you are inside. Airports often even pay for these upgrades.
> The housing price around major airports is lower than it otherwise would be
It causes problems way further out than that. For example the expansion of Schiphol and now Lelystad airport will cause noise problems for people who live over 100 miles from the airport.
Due to how crowded the airspace is here they have to descent very low to avoid other traffic. Same goes for the holding pattern. I just looked it up and the new routes are between 5000 and 6000 feet.
I'm sorry, but you are entirely wrong if you think that airplanes are going to be at 5000 or 6000 feet 100 miles away from their destination. That's not even remotely how modern jet airliners operate.
This has been a really hot topic in my country, lots of debates, protests, accusations flying back and forth over wether noise impact studies were done correctly or not. It's been on the news for months.
Basically, Schiphol is getting too crowded so they are opening a second location (actually, it already exist but it's a small airport now which mainly services small private planes) in Lelystad. As the new location is relatively close to Schiphol (about 32 miles) the new inbound routes and holding patterns have to be below the existing routes for Schiphol because there simply is no other place for them to go.
I skimmed both of those and I don't see how you're getting the claim that 100 miles out an airliner is going to be at FL50-60.
The noise estimations in your first link show the estimated noise in Ens which is 18 miles out and directly below the approach path at 40 dB, and for a more pathological case in Wezep 20 miles out at 45 dB. For reference that's somewhere between "noise at the library" and "quiet suburb"[1].
If you search for "Projectie Route" you can see graphs showing that the estimated approach and departure paths, planes coming in for landing are at FL60 5-10 miles out, planes departing are climbing past FL30 10 miles out.
I'm not dismissing the fact that some people in close by bedroom communities are going to be hearing airplanes regularly, but this claim that it's going to be an issue for anyone even 20 miles out is nonsense, let alone 100 miles out.
Ghent in Belgium is around 100 miles from Amsterdam, planes just crossing the Dutch-Belgian border aren't at FL50 as if they were on their final approach to Schiphol.
Of course, but the context here is GPs claim that people will have "their lives ruined" by the presence of an airport.
That's easily shown to be hyperbolic nonsense if you look at housing prices in the "worst" (some people like it) possible places near runways at busy international airports. There's a drop for sure, but it's marginal.
Now compare that marginal drop to the overall positive impact on the local economy from more tourism, better access to travel from people who live within hours driving distance of the city etc., and it becomes easy to make the case that the lack of airport expansion is more a case of NIMBY-ism than some optimization for the common good.
But there's more to happiness than housing prices. It could be the house they grew up in, invested a lot of personal work in to improve it, their friends and family may live in the vicinity, but they get stressed out or can't sleep because of the noise of aircraft taking off right over their house. If the airport is expanding, that runway might not have been there when they bought the house.
The tourism and extra revenue for other people does not help the people who suffer from the daily noise. The slight drop in house value isn't the problem, but the fact that they may have to move at all.
If your house has to be torn down to make place for a new runway, you hopefully get paid well over the market value for your house. But if your house can stay, but is suddenly right next to a runway, you may wish they'd bought your house, but airports usually don't reimburse those people the same way.
There's a good reason why airports have noise regulations. Unfortunately, it turns out those rules can be far too flexible. Around Schiphol, it turns out the measured noise doesn't count. They calculate how much noise you get, and if your experience is different, tough luck.
We can both come up with sob stories all day. So that old couple sells their house, then what about the young father entering the job market who could afford a cheaper house closer to Amsterdam to commute into work and see his kid more often? The kid loves airplanes and one of their favorite pastimes is watching them come in for landing.
Of course people who don't yet get any benefits from the airport construction aren't vocal about increased investment in its infrastructure, even though collectively they'll be the beneficiaries.
This is a classic example of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, with the concentrated benefit being the NIMBYs who live near the airport and benefit from the status quo, and the greater diffuse cost being what society at large has to lose from it not being built out.
I'm not familiar with how airport noise regulations work in The Netherlands, but the situation you're describing with Schiphol doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
Unlike a club next door the amount of noise from an airport should be easily predicted based on available data, we know where the planes were at at any given time, and can construct very accurate models of what the noise at any given point on the ground will be.
Why would the council need to show up to do noise measurements only to find that yes, the noise is pretty much exactly the same as what your neighbor next door is experiencing?
If the noise is being systematically underestimated that's another matter, which the courts could presumably sort out, but that they're relying on estimations seems like good policy to me.
All I'm saying is that it's not just about housing prices. Hub airports tend to be in densely populated areas where there's simply not much room for a big airport. Schiphol has the advantage that it's in a fairly empty polder with mostly farms, but there are a lot of towns and cities around it.
The decision on whether to allow an airport to expand is a careful balance of a lot of different concerns. An honest government or regulator weighs those concerns honestly, but because of the financial concerns surrounding a big airport, there's always an incentive to game the system.
