Airservices Australia is Australia’s air traffic management and aviation rescue fire-fighting service provider. Our primary focus is ensuring the safety of air travel both in the air and on the ground.

Aircraft arriving at and leaving Brisbane use a network of flight paths designed to ensure a safe and efficient flow of traffic. These paths were updated in July 2020 to support the introduction of the new runway at Brisbane Airport.

A year after the opening of the new runway, Airservices conducted a post-implementation review to evaluate how the new airspace design was going. 

The review found that people were concerned about where, and how often, flights are passing over the city and suburbs. Some community members expected more flights to go over Moreton Bay instead.

To address these concerns, Airservices created the Noise Action Plan for Brisbane, which involves four work packages:

• Package one: Establishing strong, transparent, and representative project governance.
• Package two: To maximise flights over the water.
• Package three: Reduce the frequency and concentration of flights over communities.
• And Package four: To optimise the performance of the wider Brisbane airspace system. 

Brisbane is served by a large and complex airspace system. The arrival and departure paths that serve Brisbane interact with the wider airspace and the flight paths to and from other nearby airports.

Many of the flight paths are interconnected. Making changes that will share noise in one area will often affect traffic flows elsewhere. A holistic approach is required. 

Managing these connections involves making trade-offs that may result in benefits for some areas but not others or new negative impacts. 

Maintaining high safety standards is paramount and will not be traded-off, requiring careful planning and coordination across all proposed changes.

Using both runways for landing and taking off at the same time is known as independent parallel runway operations.

In order for this to be managed safely, a number of parameters need to be met. The flight paths were designed to meet the international rule set for Independent Parallel Runway Operations but some changes have since been made to these standards and adjustments to the design are required.  This forms part of the Noise Action Plan for Brisbane Package 3 deliverables, alongside the options which aim to reduce the frequency and concentration of overflight.

Our first step in developing noise sharing options was to create a heatmap from actual flight track data. 

The heatmap shows where the majority of flights are passing over the city and suburbs in the current two-runway airspace design. It helps compare the impacts with those experienced before the new runway was introduced and can be used to illustrate the expected outcome of any proposed changes. Using the heatmap and community input received during the post implementation review, we have identified sections of airspace that have seen an increase in the frequency and concentration of flights and examined the potential options for sharing the impacts.

In each airspace section, we defined the broadest range of potential flight path options that are technically viable (although many may not be desirable). By consistently assessing each of the potential flight paths, we can start to compare them and identify improvement opportunities.

The performance of each flight path is evaluated based on:

Overflight contours measuring the total population overflown - out to 25 nautical miles from the airport.

Population within 70 decibel and 60 decibel single noise event contours.

Number of track miles for departures and arrivals.

And changes to climb or descent gradients.

Using a database of this performance information, we can filter and rank all the potential flight paths to identify the higher-performing options for noise management.

We then test these flight path design options against the Airservices Flight Path Design Principles and the objective of Package 3, which is to reduce the frequency and concentration of overflights. The options are then presented to industry and the community to gather feedback.

We will engage with affected communities to gather feedback on the potential options, assess how effectively they reduce the frequency and concentration of flights and understand the likely trade-offs of doing so.

Communities will have the opportunity to provide feedback on the options, influence the development of the preferred flight path designs, and submit additional feedback to inform the final review stage.

The goal of the first round of community engagement is to collect early feedback on a wide range of potential design options for each section of airspace. This helps us to better understand community views towards key issues, like aircraft noise concentration versus noise sharing and gather diverse perspectives informed by local circumstances. 

Based on insights from community and industry feedback, along with additional data on the operational and environmental impacts of the potential designs, we will refine and update the flight path options, focusing on those that best meet our decision-making criteria.

In the second round of community engagement, we will present more detailed information about the preferred options.

The goal of the second round of engagement is to collect final views from the community and industry on the preferred options, test the accuracy and completeness of the data and feedback used to make key design choices; and ensure we have identified all opportunities to optimise the positive impacts of a change and mitigate the negative ones.

Following the second round of engagement we will clearly communicate the reasons for the design decisions we have made, including how trade-offs were evaluated and the rationale behind the preferred options.

Throughout the process we will strive to balance the benefits and drawbacks across different areas, with the aim of ensuring that no single community bears a disproportionate share of the negative impacts.

This approach ensures that benefits are balanced across the airspace system and that all affected communities have a voice in the process.