Two new aircraft noise monitoring stations have been installed in the City of Delta.
The Vancouver Airport Authority recently installed permanent monitors in Ladner at Hawthorne Elementary and in North Delta at Sunshine Hills Elementary.
Delta made the request for the additional stations three years ago.
A Delta staff report to council notes that real-time noise data measured by the new noise monitoring terminals is now displayed on YVR's WebTrak, an online tool for tracking aircraft in the Metro Vancouver airspace.
The monitoring terminals are to establish a baseline for aircraft noise over Ladner and Sunshine Hills and capture change over time as the airline industry emerges from the pandemic.
Data collected from the monitoring terminals will be included in YVR's 2021 Aeronautical Noise Management Report.
The airport has been managing 20 other noise monitoring terminals across Metro Vancouver, including three in Delta at Delview Secondary School, North Delta Recreation Centre and South Delta Secondary School.
In 2018, Nav Canada announced that it was launching the Vancouver Airspace Modernization Project (VAMP) to review aircraft approach and departure operations in the Greater Vancouver and Southern Vancouver Island regions.
That project was initiated, in part, to address the significant forecasted commercial air traffic growth for YVR, which will result in increased future noise over Delta.
The city conveyed a number of concerns and suggestions including creating routes over unpopulated areas like oceans, highways, industrial/commercial areas, as well as focus the airspace design on the areas that are most impacted.
The YVR 2037 Master Plan, a 20-year roadmap for the airport that has been approved by the federal government, projects aircraft movements over Tsawwassen would increase by 430 per cent, while North Delta would experience a 154 per cent increase.
A previous Delta civic report notes that while those increases are years away, staff believed it was a good opportunity to propose a number of initiatives for the 2019 to 2023 YVR Noise Management Plan that could help establish a more comprehensive aircraft noise and flight path baseline for Delta.
The proposed initiatives included increasing the number of noise monitors in Delta.
