Aircraft noise in Vienna: what the official map does not show
Measured against all 99 Vienna neighbourhoods, the official aircraft-noise contour covers not one of them. That is correct — and it says nothing about whether you will hear planes.
You stand on a balcony at a viewing, a plane comes over, and you ask yourself whether that happens all day. Then you look at the official noise map and find nothing at all over the city. Both observations are correct, and the gap between them is what this page is about.
What the official map records
Point-in-polygon against the centre of every one of the 99 neighbourhoods, holes included, run on 2026-07-26. Reproducible: scripts/generate-fluglaerm.mjs.
Why an empty map is not proof of quiet
The obvious suspicion is a higher threshold for aircraft. It is not that: the lowest class in the contour is 55 dB Lden, exactly the threshold used for roads. What differs is the metric. Lden averages a whole year, weighting evening and night more heavily. An approach at nine hundred metres is loud for about a minute. Spread across 8,760 hours, it falls below the threshold before the contour reaches a residential street — even though the same official file records 247,957 movements a year at Vienna Airport, roughly 679 a day.
This is not a scandal and not a cover-up. An annual average is the right instrument for a motorway, which is loud every day at the same hour. It is the wrong instrument for an event that happens seven times in twenty minutes and then not again for an hour. A listing that advertises “no aircraft noise” with reference to that map is reading an absence of data as a fact.
What we measure ourselves — and what we do not say yet
Since 26 July 2026 we have been recording, every minute, which aircraft are over Vienna below three thousand metres — two snapshots twenty seconds apart, with the path between them interpolated, never extrapolated (a projected track is off by more than a kilometre after a minute; we measured that before discarding the idea). From this we will be able to say, per neighbourhood, in what share of observations an aircraft was low overhead.
What we will never say is a counted total. We observe twenty of every sixty seconds, so “412 overflights in seven days” would be an invented number, however good it sounds. And no ranking of districts before both operating directions are covered: the corridor turns with the wind, and a list built on one weather pattern would be wrong for half the city — permanently, because search engines index it.
What you can check at a viewing
Look up, not at a map. An aircraft on approach is unmistakable — low, slow, landing gear down. If you see one in the ten minutes you are standing there, you are under a corridor at least in this wind. Go a second time on a day with the wind from the other direction; one visit proves little, because the direction turns. Ask the neighbours rather than the agent: people who have lived through a summer there know the pattern by heart. And note the time — the quiet hour you happen to visit in says nothing about the wave twenty minutes later.
Find quiet places in Vienna →Frequently asked
Is there aircraft noise in Vienna?
Yes, and the official noise map shows none of it. Measured against all 99 Vienna neighbourhoods, the EU environmental-noise contour for aircraft (2022 mapping round) contains zero of them — for the day-evening-night level Lden and for the night level Lnight alike. Its western edge sits at longitude 16.441; the closest neighbourhood centre, Kledering, lies 0.7 km outside it. The same official dataset records 247,957 aircraft movements a year at Vienna Airport. Both things are true at once.
Why does the official map show no aircraft noise over Vienna?
Not because of a higher threshold: the lowest mapped class is 55 dB Lden — the same reporting threshold used for road noise. The reason is the metric. Lden is an ANNUAL AVERAGE, weighted across day, evening and night. A single approach is loud for around a minute; averaged over 8,760 hours it disappears below the threshold before it reaches the city. The map is not wrong. It answers a different question than the one you ask on your balcony.
Which districts of Vienna are affected by aircraft noise?
We do not publish a list, and any list you find elsewhere should be read carefully. Approach and departure direction at Vienna Airport turns with the wind — aircraft take off and land into it. On one day the corridor runs over the south of the city, on the next over the north-east. A ranking built from a few days of one weather pattern would permanently label the wrong half of Vienna. We have been recording since 26 July 2026 and will publish shares per neighbourhood once enough samples across both operating directions exist.
Does aircraft noise affect the VLM Living Score?
No. The score uses the official noise mapping for road, rail and industry — data that exists for every square metre of the city. Aircraft noise is not in it, and we would rather say so than fold a guess into a number. When our own measurement is solid it will appear as a separate, clearly labelled signal, never quietly inside the score.
Does “not mapped” mean quiet?
Never. Below the 55 dB threshold the official map records nothing at all — no zone means no data, not silence. This holds for road noise too: a street below the threshold is simply not drawn. Any listing that advertises “no aircraft noise” on the basis of an official map is reading an absence as a fact.
Sources: environmental noise mapping 2022 under EU directive 2002/49/EC, BMK / Umweltbundesamt, CC BY 4.0 — www.laerminfo.at. Aircraft movements: the same dataset (major airports). Our own overflight recording: community ADS-B receivers, no personal data.
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