Disruptive Flyovers in the NNE

The outgoing mayor wants to extend VTANG's lease at the Burlington International airport for another 25 years.  The current lease is set to expire in just under 25 years; however, the DoD apparently will not release funding for construction projects at the base unless there are more than 25 years left on the lease.  Capital expenditures are only planned out 5 years in advance,but $50M is on the line.  That said, it might be nice to renegotiate VTANG's mission.  

A sore spot for some residents over the last few years has been the introduction of the F-35 planes at the base.  I've been a resident of the NNE, and worked remotely from my home, for 22 years.  For the first 18 years, a few times a year the F-16s would fly overhead and I'd think, "Wow!  That's loud," and go on about my day.  With the arrival of the F-35s, this changed, and in April of 2020, I started to keep track of the number of flyovers that disrupted normal life -- not "I can hear them in the distance", but "I have difficulty having a normal conversation inside my home because the planes are so loud."  The table and chart below are summaries of that dataset.  What is striking is not only the number of minutes of disruption, but that 2023 is showing a significant increase over previous years. 

Below are charts showing:

• Flyovers by day of the week; they are mostly in the middle of the week.
• Flyovers by time of day; they are typically during the first two hours of the workday and then again after a noon lunch 
• Flyovers by time of day and date; this shows the consistency of when the disruptions typically occur over time

In my dataset, I record the date and time of the disruption; if the disruptive noise continues for several minutes, I record each minute, which helps to differentiate between a relatively brief flyover versus an extended one.  An important caveat is that I don't run outside to check whether the aircraft causing the disruption is an F-35; I simply record the timestamp.  July 2022, for example, stands out because VTANG's F-35s were deployed overseas at that time.  I don't know what other aircraft might have been flying during that month; again, I simply record the timestamp and try to get back to work.

Obviously, this is my personal experience and not everyone is adversely affected by the noise.

I don't know whether the issue is that the F-35s are significantly louder than the F-16s, or whether they've changed the flight patterns so they fly over my neighborhood more often.  What I do know is that this is a drastic change from my experience with the F-16s; if they had been this disruptive when I arrived in 2001, I likely would have relocated.