Aircraft operation reconstruction and airport noise prediction from high-resolution flight tracking data

• Open high-resolution flight tracking data are used to identify flight operations. • The tracking data are fully integrated into the aircraft trajectory reconstruction. • The aircraft take-off weight is estimated from the tracking data near the lift-off. • The reconstructed aircraft operations are used to predict airport noise levels. • At Zurich Airport, the predicted noise underestimation is about 1.7 dB(A). Massive amounts of highly time-resolved and freely available flight tracking data are fed into a modelling tool previously devised by the authors, which was improved to perform optimal reconstruction of low-altitude aircraft operations and more accurate prediction of airport noise. The benefits of the high-resolution data, key novelty of this work, include easier flight operation identification, higher-quality ground track reconstruction, and an upgraded aircraft performance estimation. This is conducted with a new version of the authors’ mixed analysis-synthesis approach, where more degrees of freedom are added to the prescribed flight procedures and the aircraft take-off weight is estimated from the tracking data. The results obtained for Zurich Airport and 2022 traffic show the ability of the proposed approach to capture the actual flight procedures during departure and arrival operations, ultimately leading to a slight underestimation (1.7 dB(A) on average) of the exposure-based cumulative noise level in the airport area.