Make Sure Your Next Home Isn’t in a Noisy Airport Flight Path

When you’re apartment or home searching, chances are you know not to rent or buy that unit that’s across the street from a train track or a granite quarry. But there’s another common source of noise pollution that most people don’t think twice about, and no, it isn’t your — ahem — neighbor’s inappropriate noises. Instead, it’s airplane noise.

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself, “What are the flight paths over my house?” Trust me — it can make a difference in your quality of life! Residing in close proximity to an airport, or even near a popular flight path, can mean lots of noise all day and all night, which isn’t exactly a way to establish good energy in your new space. Not to mention exposure to all that airplane noise, which has been associated with poorer health outcomes!

While it’s hard to say definitively that being in a flight path will affect the value of the home you want to buy or are trying to sell, one study, published in 2022 in Taylor & Francis Online, found that “various international studies … have tended to show that properties located in closer proximity to an airport tend to have their prices lower than their counterparts, primarily due to increased exposure to noise and air pollution.” That being said, that study also pointed to a 2003 study that found that being close to an airport “revealed price premiums.” 

Plus, if you live in a high cost of living city or an overall very desirable area, whether or not you’re close to an airport or in a flight path might not matter at all. Jay Garvens, a business development manager for Churchill Mortgage in Colorado Springs, Colorado, previously told Realtor.com that “some cities … buck the [lower home price] trend, mostly because of supply and demand.”

While plenty of people live in flight paths — and flight paths can change even after you buy a home if your local airport changes its runways — there are still several sites and apps you can check out before you sign on the dotted line to ensure you won’t be dwelling beneath a noisy flight path if that’s something that really matters to you.

You can use the FlightStats website or app to track flights by airport. So, if you know you’ll be living near a popular airport, this site will give you a good sense of which particular areas might be louder and busier when it comes to air traffic than others. 

A low-cost subscription service allows for advanced features like historical flight status (has the location you’re eyeballing always been relatively flight-free, or could things change with time?) and arrival and departure schedules.

Check it out: FlightStats (Free to use; subscriptions start at $2.99/month) 

Among the many features you’ll find on both the site and the app is a zoomable flight map that shows routes of flights and the number of times the plane takes that particular path. 

FlightAware allows you to check the status of any commercial airline flight, but also takes private and charter planes into account, which is good since they can also be a source of noise.

Check it out: FlightAware Flight Tracker (Free to use; subscriptions start at $44.95/month)

This full-color site allows you to see flights in and out of more than 4,000 airports around the world. Similar to the flight map on the FlightAware site, FlightRadar offers a zoomable map and allows you to easily enter origin and destination flights.

As an advanced feature, you can use smartphone technology in the accompanying FlightRadar app to gain information about a specific airplane that’s flying overhead if you’re wondering, “what are the flight paths over my house?”

Check it out: FlightRadar24 (Free to use; subscriptions start at $12.99/year)

At first glance, SkyVector can easily overwhelm your senses with an intricate display of aeronautical charts.

But fear not. As Yahoo! Answers user David J. explains, “You need to look at a flight chart of your area to see if any airways exist above your area. Go to skyvector.com and click on the chart that is in your area. Then you’ll notice a series of circles with tick marks, which are called VORs (short for Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Radio Ranges).

These VORs have airways coming out of them, shown as light blue lines, and their names start with a “V.” Jets and airlines only fly on those designated airways. As long as none of those airways are above the location of the house, you won’t get any jets flying above, except if you are in the immediate vicinity of a major airport.”

Check it out: SkyVector

You can always keep things low-tech and friendly, and knock on the doors of potential future neighbors about the flight path over your potential house as well.