One of the most famous scenes in Hong Kong used to be the sight of planes roaring low over the heart of Kowloon as they came in to land at the old Kai Tak airport.
Now, eight years after the closure of Kai Tak, residents in the city of 6.8 million are reaching for the earplugs again because of the sheer volume of flights passing overhead.
The Civil Aviation Department saw complaints about aircraft noise from Hong Kong residents nearly treble in the last quarter of last year, from eight complaints in 2004 to 25 last year, according to figures released yesterday.
The rising tide of complaints appears to be a result of the steep increase in air traffic in and out of Chek Lap Kok airport on Lantau Island, west of central Hong Kong, which replaced Kai Tak in 1998.
The number of planes taking off on routes crossing over Hong Kong Island increased by almost 500 year on year to 5,055 in December alone.
Over the past year, the number of flights taking off over Hong Kong increased by 5,324 to 43,959 -- the equivalent of 120 flights every day, or 15 a day more than in 2004.
One young mother living on the western side of Hong Kong Island said: "The planes fly over so low and so frequently now that my two-year-old son has become an aircraft spotter."
"They come over so low you can see the airline's livery, and the noise is sometimes so great that you have to stop what you are doing and get off the phone if in the middle of a conversation," she said.
A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Department said the rise in complaints at the end of last year had been partly caused by a small group of "perpetual complainants."
The spokesman said a number of measures had been taken to lessen the impact of aircraft noise, barring takeoffs where possible between 11pm and 7am and banning noisy aircraft from taking off over Hong Kong Island.
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