Was talking to the owner of a local pest control company recently when he brought up the subject of bed buds. Said they were horrible for what they did to people, how they got in your head, made people paranoid. Even after an exterminator whipped them out, people would obsess about the possibility that they still had bed bugs in their house, be sure that every bite they got was from a bed bug instead of a mosquito.
I wonder if something like that isn’t happening now with the airport noise complaints coming form people living south of the airport. Recall that they always had some planes flying over their house on takeoff, then the FAA started using a new, more precise navigation procedure called RNAV and suddenly all the planes taking off from a certain runway — think multiple hundred a day — were over their neighborhood, their house. Now the airport has gotten approval to spread the flight paths for planes takeoffs out more, but the residents (some residents?) claim they have not noticed a difference. They says the noise is still there, bad as under RNAV. Perhaps at this stage some of these property owners have simply become so fixated on aircraft noise, that it’s messing with their perception. After all, the question of how many planes are over your house is an objective one — you can simply count planes. But mere counts won’t matter for those for whom the pest of aircraft noise has gotten into their heads.
