Aircraft noise in Vienna: what the official map does not show
The official contour covers none of Vienna's 99 neighbourhoods — we checked. So we built our own radar: every minute, two snapshots, three sources.
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.
Aircraft noise at your address? Type it in — Azima computes the approach paths and the overflights for exactly that spot.
The address goes to the City of Vienna address service for the search, never to Vienna Living Map. The result stays on this device. No account.
What the official map records
Point-in-polygon against the centre of every one of the 99 neighbourhoods, holes included, run on 2026-09-24. 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 Vienna Airport reports 240,360 take-offs and landings for 2025, roughly 659 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.
So a radar of its own came about
Check the contour instead of assuming it
Point-in-polygon of the mapped zones against the centre of every one of the 99 Vienna neighbourhoods, holes included, for Lden and for Lnight. That check is where the zero above comes from — publicly, nobody had run it.
99 neighbourhoods. Not one of them lies inside the aircraft-noise contour. Count the overflights instead
If an annual average cannot see a single overflight, the overflights have to be counted. Since 2026-07-25 a job asks community ADS-B receivers every minute which aircraft stand over Vienna below three thousand metres.
One minute: two snapshots twenty seconds apart (tall), the path between them interpolated (medium), forty seconds unseen (faint). Why every minute?
An approach crosses five kilometres in about a minute. A single snapshot therefore catches roughly seventeen of the 99 neighbourhoods and misses the chain of aircraft behind it entirely. The first attempt did exactly that — and it took a person counting from a balcony to notice.
Throw away the shortcut
Projecting each track forward from heading and speed would have been cheaper — one snapshot every half hour would have done. Built, measured, thrown away.
What the measurement showed
After sixty seconds the projected position is off by 1.0 to 1.4 kilometres — a quarter of the distance actually flown. Extrapolated over four minutes it lands in the wrong district. So interpolation happens only BETWEEN two observed points, and the job runs sixty times an hour instead of twice.
What this answers per neighbourhood: in what share of the observations an aircraft stood low overhead. What it will never say is a counted total. And it stays a log, not a league table — 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.
And how often it actually turns
On 97 of 99 days with a determinable direction the operating direction changed within the day. That is the whole point of the page in one line: which houses lie under the approach is not a property of the address. The wind decides it, on the day.
Share of all 35,053 snapshots since 2026-07-25. In 79.8 % of them the direction could not be determined — so the two shares above are floors, not ceilings.
Where this number comes from
Derived from the tracks of low-flying aircraft near the airport, not an official figure: an aircraft on final approach flies the runway heading, and the closest of the four runway headings identifies the direction in use. "Not determinable" means too few low aircraft in that hour, or no clear majority among them. And which axis was in use says nothing about how loud it was at any one place — only which houses were in question at all.
What our radar has seen so far
For each of the 99 neighbourhoods, this counts how many aircraft below three thousand metres come within two and a half kilometres of its centre. A sample, not a measurement, and never a decibel figure — but the only per-neighbourhood answer that exists for Vienna.
How to read these numbers
Recorded since 2026-07-25. The aircraft per hour are counted, not estimated: the same machine shows up in consecutive snapshots and is recognised by its transponder code, so it counts once. We watch twenty of every sixty seconds — so this is a floor, not a ceiling.
And why no altitude figure stands here: the feed reports one, but a MINIMUM over 100 days is a single machine, not a measurement. The same value of 671 m appears above thirty different neighbourhoods — one aircraft on one barometric step, travelling across half of Vienna as everyone's "lowest". Measured against the 3-degree approach glide path, the lowest readings come out at 4 to 20 per cent of the height an approaching airliner would have there: those are gliders and helicopters, of which Vienna has many (99 of 99 places record rotorcraft). An altitude returns here when the feed separates rotorcraft reliably and a value no longer rests on one overflight.
Aircraft per hour on average, with the flights and hours behind it · as of 2026-11-01
Show all 99 neighbourhoodsShow fewer
This is not a ranking of aircraft noise in Vienna, and it is not meant as one. The operating direction at Schwechat turns with the wind: on one day the approach runs over the east of the city, on the next over the south-west. A short window mostly shows the weather of that window. We publish the denominator with every number so you can judge the weight yourself; the picture gets steadier with every day.
When do they fly?
Between 23:00 and 05:00 there is, on average, hardly an aircraft over the city. Traffic builds from around 07:00, is densest towards 10:00, and holds at a similar level until about 18:00.
Aircraft below 3000 m over Vienna at the same moment, averaged per snapshot · local time · 24 of 24 hours covered
A low average does not mean quiet. Anyone living under a corridor still hears the single machine, at five in the morning as much as at noon — an average over the whole city cannot carry that. The curve shows the RHYTHM of the day, never the loudness.
✈ See the live chapter in the app — daily curve, landing direction, method →
And at night?
There is no blanket night curfew at Vienna Airport — it holds a licence to operate around the clock. What exists is a ceiling. Between 23:30 and 05:30, 4,700 takeoffs and landings per calendar year are written into the mediation agreement of 2005. That works out to roughly 13 a night, about 2.1 in each hour of the core night, against about 659 movements on an ordinary day — some 2 per cent of the year's traffic. Ambulance flights, safety requirements, closed runways and unusual weather are exempt from the count.
A second rule matters more for who actually hears something, and it appears in no noise level: from 21:00 to 07:00, in calm wind, only runway 11/29 may be used. At night the traffic lies on one axis instead of two. Which end of that axis is in use still depends on the wind — runway 11 puts the approach over the city, runway 29 over the countryside to the south-east. So a quiet night in one part of Vienna is not a promise for the next one.
Our own recording covers 7 of the core-night hours so far (24 of 24 hours in all). An empty hour in our curve means “not measured yet”, never “no aircraft”. Night rules: Dialogforum Flughafen Wien.
Where the approach comes from
Schwechat has two runways, and aircraft land into the wind. That gives four landing directions — and only two of them lead over Vienna. Which one applies right now is decided by the weather, not by the address.
Landing towards the south-east, the approach comes from the north-west — diagonally across the city: Simmering, Favoriten, Meidling, Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus and Penzing, from about six kilometres short of the threshold outwards.
Landing towards the south, the approach comes from the north-north-west — nearly twenty kilometres continuously over Donaustadt, from the city edge to just short of the threshold.
Landing towards the north-west, the approach comes from the east-south-east — over the countryside. This axis does not touch Vienna at all.
Landing towards the north, the approach comes from the south-south-east — over the countryside. This axis does not touch Vienna at all.
Lying under an axis says nothing about how often it is in use — the wind decides that over the course of a year. And an axis is a line on a map, not a noise level: how much of it reaches a window depends on altitude, weather and what stands in between. Runway geometry from OpenStreetMap; the districts crossed are computed against the official boundaries, not remembered.
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 →Before you buy a flat, the Azima report shows whether the address lies in an approach corridor and how many overflights its own series counts over that Grätzl — alongside the sun per room, summer heat and street noise of the flat.
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. Vienna Airport itself reports 240,360 take-offs and landings for 2025. 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. Recording has been running since 2026-07-25. On 97 of 99 days with a determinable direction the operating direction changed within the day. What stands here instead is a log with denominators: for every neighbourhood the aircraft per hour, and next to it how many flights across how many hours that figure rests on. Sorted by amount so a place can be found — not as a ranking of exposure. A ranking built from a few days of one weather pattern would permanently label the wrong half of Vienna, because search engines index it.
Are there flights over Vienna at night?
Yes, but few. There is no blanket curfew — Vienna Airport is licensed to operate around the clock. Between 23:30 and 05:30, however, the 2005 mediation agreement caps movements at 4,700 per calendar year, monitored by the Dialogforum Flughafen Wien. That is roughly 13 a night, about 2.1 in each hour of the core night, against about 659 on an ordinary day. Ambulance flights, safety requirements, closed runways and unusual weather do not count against the cap. On top of that, from 21:00 to 07:00 only runway 11/29 may be used in calm wind, so night traffic runs on a single axis — which end of it depends on the wind.
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: Flughafen Wien AG, traffic results 2025. Night rules and runway distribution plan: Dialogforum Flughafen Wien. Our own overflight recording: community ADS-B receivers, no personal data.
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