This is one real Thursday at Dublin Airport, what if they sent flights over your house instead?
On 20 August 2026, — jet departures left Dublin Airport's
North Runway. The orange threads are where they actually went. The white bar
is the runway, and it never moves on this page: it was built under a planning
permission and it is where it is.
Where the aircraft go afterwards is another matter. daa's position, given to
an Oireachtas committee in January 2023, is that flight paths are "not a
factor of our planning permission". On that account nobody's consent is
needed to send the departures somewhere else.
So pick a street. The routes swing round to it while the runway stays put:
the same aircraft, the same hour of the morning, the same height at the same
distance from the same runway end. If departures already cross the spot you
pick, nothing is moved and you are shown the real day.
Every overflight of the day, placed by the clock and drawn to its
peak level. The shaded ends of the strip are 23:00 to 07:00.
How this is worked out
The flights are the real ones: every departure recorded off runway 28R on
20 August 2026, with its aircraft type, its time off the runway and its
track. Turboprops and ten flights with no recorded type are left out, so
the count here is lower than the day's 372.
Where a place already lies under a departure route, no turn is applied and
the figures are simply that day. Turning the airport for someone who is
already under it would overstate what they live with, and they can check
the page against their own morning.
The turn is a rigid rotation of the routes about the departure end of the
runway. The runway does not move, because it could not be moved without a
planning permission; the routes move, because daa says they need none. Every
aircraft keeps the height it really held at that distance from the end of the
runway, so the turn cannot make one lower or louder than it was.
One simplification in the reader's favour, stated plainly: a real change of
route would turn the traffic over a few kilometres rather than pivot it at
the runway end. This page swings each track whole, to show where the traffic
would end up rather than to draw the departure procedure that would take it
there. Heights, speeds and power settings are the ones actually flown.
The noise is daa's own measurement. The level of each type at each distance
comes from a propagation law fitted to 364,831 noise-monitor events that daa
itself recorded and released under access-to-information request AIE 2611.
The figure is a single-event peak (LAmax) outdoors; indoors with a window
open is appreciably quieter.
Two simplifications worth knowing. Ground height is taken as a constant, so
places on higher ground are treated as slightly further from the aircraft
than they are. And positions arrive about every sixteen seconds, so the
closest approach is interpolated between them.
Nothing you click is sent anywhere. The place you pick is held in the part
of the web address after the # symbol, which browsers never transmit to the
server, so the link is shareable and the server still never learns it.
North Runway Technical Group. Data and method:
dublin-north-runway.com.