Former Prime Minister Mark Rutte tried to solve the problem in 2023 by imposing a cap of 460,000 flights. But that sparked a backlash from both the EU and the U.S., and his government announced a hurried retreat after failing to get the Commission’s approval.
Tech fixes
The industry feels the new proposed limit of 478,000 is far too low, and took the matter to court. Rather than limit flights, it argues that advances in airplane and engine design will do enough to cut noise.
“The government says, ‘We want 20 percent less noise.’ The aircraft that we have bought, and that [manufacturers] are going to produce, [are] 20 percent less noisy. So we don’t understand why there’s an issue and why there has to be reduction in slots,” Air France-KLM’s Smith said.
Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, which operates only a few routes from Schiphol, is even more optimistic.
“The new aircraft we’re buying from Boeing … [are] 50 percent quieter” than previous models, he said.
But Roberto Merino-Martinez, an aeronautics and aircraft noise researcher at the Delft University of Technology, said such a reduction won’t halve the total sound emitted by planes that can be heard by the human ear, and that promising a percentage reduction is often a “red flag,” given the logarithmic nature of noise measurement.