The skies around western Massachusetts are getting a whole lot louder.
On June 11, four new F-35A fighter jets arrived on loan at Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport, where they’ve been flying training missions about two days per week. The planes are twice as loud as the F-15C jets they’re replacing. And once the entire new fleet — up to 21 of the stealth war-fighting aircraft at a cost of more than $100 million each — arrives at the home of the 104th Fighter Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, they’ll be flying twice as frequently as the older jets, too.
That’s a significant increase in noise that those in the region, particularly in Westfield, will endure — or enjoy, depending on who you ask — likely for decades to come.
“There are people who love the noise because it’s the ‘sound of freedom.’ There are people that don’t like it because it’s the sound of war,” north end resident and former City Councilor Mary Ann Babinski told The Shoestring.
But despite the roaring noise, The Shoestring has learned that there will be no buyouts of homes near Barnes Airport as part of the city of Westfield’s new noise mitigation program to accommodate the jets’ arrival. Instead, the city will focus its anticipated $15 million in state and federal funds to install sound insulation and noise-reflecting window glazing on nearby residences.
After decades of development, the F-35 began combat operations in 2018, first by Israel and later the United States, against the Taliban. The Air Force intends to fly F-35s into the late 2080s at an estimated total cost of over $2 trillion, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Their early arrival in Westfield breaks the relative silence the city has witnessed since the last of its squadron of F-15Cs was retired last October. Barnes Airport is owned by the municipality of Westfield, and while civilian traffic continued in the jets’ absence — including a flight school that flies small propeller driven planes and the jet-setting class — the absence of fighter-jet traffic has not been seen since the F-15s arrival in 2007.
At-large City Councilor Kristen Mello told The Shoestring that during those months, her neighborhood on the north side of Westfield was “the quietest it’s been since 2009.”
Due to the F-15s’ incredibly loud engines, the city previously received funds from the federal government to undertake residential noise mitigation measures. In addition to soundproofing retrofits, between 2011 and 2019 the city purchased 24 homes surrounding the airport at a price of $5 million — accounting for more than half of noise mitigation funding it received during the same time period — and demolished them.
“We’re not doing that this time,” Barnes Airport manager Dan Shearer told The Shoestring.
That change might come as a disappointment to some nearby homeowners, including one who previously told The Shoestring he hoped the city would buy his house and raze it to the ground because he found the noise of the military planes so unbearable. But Shearer said it’s “more bang for the buck” to retrofit homes.
“By focusing on sound insulation instead of acquiring and demolishing a few homes, we are able to improve more homes,” Shearer said.
Shearer said he estimates grants for noise mitigation from federal and state sources will add up to around $15 million “using round numbers for discussion.”
As the first of a five-phase process, he said he expects the city to be awarded around $3 million in grants from the state and federal agencies. Of that, $2.2 million is allocated for construction costs, with the remainder to be used to produce an updated noise exposure map.
It’s unclear, however, when mitigation-related construction will begin.
In 2024, an environmental impact study conducted by the National Guard Bureau used computer simulations to estimate that as many as 394 households would fall within an area where the 24-hour average of noise exposure would be a level greater than what federal law defines as compatible with residential buildings, mobile home parks, schools, and outdoor music venues.
That number might be a conservative estimate. The National Guard’s computer modeling predicted only about half the number of homes would be affected by noise from the now-retired F-15 fleet compared to actual on-the-ground measurements conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The majority of funding will come from the FAA, which, per federal law, can’t disburse those funds until an updated noise exposure map is made using real-world data following its methodology. Because that map depends on the 104th Fighter Wing’s fleet of F-35s to be fully operational, and it is unknown when the unit will take full delivery of all planes, mitigation efforts might not begin for more than a year from when those full operations begin.
One thing that’s certain is the new jets are considerably louder.
Readers as far away as Southwick and Northampton said they heard the planes flying during times The Shoestring independently confirmed that the 104th Fighter Wing were flying training sorties.
Armed with an iPad loaded with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s “Sound Level Meter App,” which is designed to measure hazardous noise levels at an accuracy of +/- 2 decibels, this reporter set off to quantify the experience of being near one of the overhead jets.
There are several different methods for measuring noise levels, including what’s known as A-weighting and C-weighting. A-weighting is a measurement designed to best capture how humans perceive sounds, while C-weighting more reliably measures the air pressure from sound, including frequencies closer to the lower bounds of human hearing. The two measurements are not directly comparable or interchangeable because A-weighted measurements discard lower frequency sound energy.
On July 14, near the East Mountain Country Club on Paul Perez Drive, an apparent “touch-and-go” maneuver registered an A-weighted peak level of 97.1 decibels and a C-weighted peak of 123 decibels.
On July 23, from the parking lot of the Gulf Mart gas station about two miles from the airport runway, the roar of two jets above logged an A-weighted peak of 98.9 decibels and a C-weighted peak of 122.8 decibels.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sound levels over 85 A-weighted decibels can damage a person’s hearing after repeated exposures lasting eight hours or more; sound over 95 decibels can cause hearing damage in less than an hour.
According to a policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics, “noise may be especially harmful to younger children who are developing language and auditory discrimination skills.” While environmental noise is less likely to cause hearing loss than exposure to loud noises from things like personal devices, experts believe it does present a risk to healthy learning, sleep, and behavior in children.
The Shoestring found that there are two schools and four childcare facilities located just outside of the National Guard Bureau’s estimated noise exposure map.
Neither A-weighted or C-weighted measurements, however, are directly the same as a “day-night average sound level,” or DNL — a term used to describe the 24-hour average of A-weighted noise levels by adding a +10 decibel penalty to sounds between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. The idea is that DNL more realistically averages how people are affected by loud noises throughout the day and night.
DNL is the metric that the FAA uses to determine noise mitigation eligibility. The agency considers a measurement of 65 DNL to be “highly annoying” to about 10% of those exposed to it, though others have suggested that number is much higher. At that level, the FAA considers noise to be incompatible with residential communities. The F-35s in Westfield are expected to triple the area exposed to these noise levels once the full fleet is in place.
“I don’t think we’ve felt yet the full brunt of the noise that these planes can add to the area as yet,” Babinski, the former city councilor, said. “I believe it’s going to get noisier.”