Judgements of relative noisiness of a supersonic transport and several commercial-service aircraft

Two laboratory experiments were conducted on the relative noisiness of takeoff and landing operations of a supersonic transport and several other aircraft in current commercial service. A total of 96 subjects made noisiness judgments on 120 tape-recorded flyover noises in the outdoor-acoustic-simulation experiment; 32 different subjects made judgments on the noises in the indoor-acoustic-simulation experiment. The judgments were made by using the method of numerical category scaling. The effective perceived noise level underestimated the noisiness of the supersonic transport by 3.5 db. For takeoff operations, no difference was found between the noisiness of the supersonic transport and the group of other aircraft for the A-weighted rating scale; however, for landing operations, the noisiness of the supersonic transport was overestimated by 3.7 db. Very high correlation was found between the outdoor-simulation experiment and the indoor-simulation experiment