A number of reports have been published regarding the results of significant studies executed to explore whether aircraft noise and particulate pollution harms children’s reading abilities, lung development, memory, stress levels and general health. The studies have proved that the noise and air pollution around large airports does indeed negatively impact children’s health, cognitive functions and mental well-being.

The Cornell study, also known as the Munich report, was published in the a Sept. 2002 edition of the American Physiological Society’s journal, Physiological Science, is titled “A Prospective Study of Some of Effects of Aircraft Noise on Cognitive Performance in School Children.”

The study was conducted over a number of years near Munich, Germany, where a new international airport was to be built and an old one decommissioned. Scientists studied the reading, memory and speech perception of the children, whose mean age was 10.4 years, prior to the old airport being put out of service, the children living near where the new airport was to be built and then again the latter group after the airport was built and put into use.

The results of the lengthy test, which took place during the 1990s, was that aircraft noise impairs long-term memory and reading and that speech perception deficits among the noise-impaired children at the old airport were not recovered.

The other report, titled “Physiological, Motivational, and Cognitive Effects of Aircraft Noise on Children: Moving From the Laboratory to the Field,” was published in American Psychologist, Vol. 35, March 1980.

In it was announced “a link between noise and physiological processes associated with stress,” and that “[t]hese processes...are considered a health hazard. Further, it was suggested that children, the sick, and the elderly are the most susceptible to noise impact.”