In Situ Development and Application of Fly Neighborly Noise Abatement Procedures for Helicopters

In recent years significant effort has been expended to support and enhance the Helicopter Association International (HAI) Fly Neighborly Program, including focused FAA/NASA flight test programs and helicopter noise model development as well as application efforts conducted with university and industry support. Two of the challenges often faced in implementing Fly Neighborly flight operations can be the lack of available noise abatement procedure information for specific helicopter models and/or difficulties in adapting existing noise abatement procedure information to a given heliport operation. This paper provides an overview of in situ development of Fly Neighborly (FN) approach procedures that would assist operators in addressing these issues, using the Bell 407 as a case study, and examining the application of Fly Neighborly recommendations to a specific helicopter operation, the November Noise Abatement Procedure at East Hampton New York Airport. This work leveraged findings from the joint NASA- FAA-DOD flight test program conducted in 2017 and first principles helicopter noise modeling developed under the FAA ASCENT program by Penn State University in conjunction with the Advanced Acoustic Model (AAM).