AIRCRAFT NOISE AND RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY VALUES ADJACENT TO MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

An enormous growth in the volume of air traffic over recent years has brought with it increasing concern about the level of aircraft noise. In February 1989 the EC Commission published a draft Directive stating that the Commission proposes to ban, from November 1990, the addition to European airline fleets of any aircraft which received its acoustical certificate before 1977. This proposal presumes that aircraft noise is a serious problem. If this is so, it should reflect itself in property values. Interesting results on the effects of aircraft noise might be expected from an examination of the variation in house prices around a busy international airport such as that of Manchester. This paper uses house mortgage data and noise contour maps for Manchester International Airport to reveal a low negative, but weak and non-robust, relation ship between aircraft noise and property values. The paper is divided into three further sections. Section 2 puts the present study in the context of previous work, and presents results for Manchester International Airport which are then compared with the results from previous studies of other airports. Initial estimates are within the range of previous findings, but Section 3 shows that this effect reduces to zero when neighbourhood effects are allowed for. Section 4 then draws the following conclusions: since the level of explanation is high and the data set is one of the largest ever used in studies of aircraft noise, the results raise serious doubts about the universality of the supposed deleterious effects of airport proximity on the prices of residential properties, and about the basis of the proposed EC ban.