Opinion: Why is it that people who live in flight paths, lie about never hearing the aircraft?

There are only three kinds of people in the world, those who are driven to distraction by plane noise, those lucky, blessed souls who don’t live in the flight path and don’t have to worry about it, and people who lie.

Strangely, there are a lot of these dishonest dissemblers around, particularly in the suburb I have moved to, which doesn’t, thank goodness, have aircraft noise every day. Unfortunately, on the days that it does, it is loud enough to vibrate windows, frighten dogs and wake humans, even, I’m betting, dead ones.

And yet my neighbours will look me in the eye, as I plead with them, sobbing, “why didn’t somebody TELL me about the planes?” (yes, I should probably have done more research but we bought the place when the international borders were shut and the skies were blissfully quiet) and tell me that they don’t know what I’m banging on about, that they don’t even notice the noise (this is sometimes followed by a little sotto voce “any more”).

I was lucky enough, for many years, to live in some of the miraculous Sydney suburbs not ear bashed by the plane noise a city inevitably must suffer when someone makes the decision to build an airport within a short drive of the CBD.

One of them was Balmain, a miraculous enclave of wonders, just three kilometres from the CBD, that gets virtually plane noise at all. Recently, since leaving its intermittent-birdsong-over-silence shores, I have developed a sneaking suspicion that all of the people who work in air traffic control at Sydney Airport live there.

Speaking of these “people”, I’m not sure that they are human, although it’s possible that they’re just sociopaths. As I lie in bed, morning broken by the deep, bowel-grumbling roar of jet engines, I picture them as a mix between Grand Moff Tarkin (Darth Vader’s co-worker) and the T-1000 from Terminator.

Rather than gazing at a map of a soon-to-be pulverised Alderaan, the Supreme Traffic Controllers, bathed in red light and wearing black leather in my fever vision, are staring down at a map of Sydney and deciding whose turn it is to suffer.

Because this is the cruel thing, you see, in a suburb like mine. No doubt there are places nearer the airport where the jets barely cease, but where I live, you can go multiple, beautiful days with no flight movements at all. This is just the Controllers messing with you; it is the cruel, silent sting of hope.

And then, one morning, sometimes as early as 5.01am (theoretically, the lockout in Sydney is from 11pm to 6am, because some tormentor decided that seven hours is enough sleep for city dwellers, but in fact they are allowed to schedule some “limited movements” in the “shoulder periods” between 11 and midnight and 5am and 6am), the Supremer Controller will cackle, somewhere in a Dark Tower in Mascot, point at the map and shout: “Hit them in Gladesville and Drummoyne! Hit them HARD! I have received intelligence that some people in those suburbs had a late night and are horribly hungover!”

And it’s not just the first, earthquake-like bed-rattler of the day, the Moff Tarkin Terminator also has his black-gloved hand on a dial that he can swivel at random to increase the frequency of large-plane landings: “Give them one … oh, every six minutes, then every 12 – just long enough so they think it’s over and start drifting back to sleep, then every THREE MINUTES!

“BWA HA HA HA HA!”

There was a point, about three months into the torment, after a particularly bad week in which the Controllers That Be decided to give us six days on and one off, at which point my wife and I seriously discussed selling up and leaving. Then we checked the prices in Balmain and just shoved our earplugs back in (yes, they kind of work, but when the very air in your bedroom is vibrating, it’s not enough).

Happily for my sanity, I recently found one neighbour who, away from the others and in a very conspiratorial tone, admits that he, too, absolutely hates the planes and considers whether life is worth living when they are in heavy rotation overhead. Fortunately for him, he’s a morning person and is usually awake at 5am anyway. Even so, it has driven him to give up working from home and head back to his CBD office, where it’s quieter.

What I find incredible is that Sydney is so smashed by plane noise that it’s not even a real-estate issue. Theoretically, suburbs in the flight path should be 50 per cent cheaper, at least, but there are just so many of them that you can’t even get a discount for being unable to sleep.

Personally, I don’t believe I will ever get used to the noise, although I might start lying to myself about it like everyone else, so I have decided to just embrace the ageing process instead. Hopefully, I will go deaf quite soon.