Photo by Daniel Reidel.

Local airports Dulles and National have received about four times as many noise complaints in 2016 as they did in 2015, according to a new report from the agency that manages them.

National Airport received 36,653 complaints from 836 individuals in 762 households in 2016, compared to 8,760 in 2015. Dulles went from 1,223 complaints in 2015 to 6,030 complaints from 93 individuals in 89 households, according to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.

Residents say the increase in complaints comes as a response to a system for managing air traffic called NextGen implemented in the past few years by the Federal Aviation Administration to increase fuel efficiency. While the MWAA report acknowledges the role of “more consolidated flight corridors” in the upswing, it also says that “community and media awareness of airline schedule changes to accommodate early and late-night travel demand” play a role in the change, too.

In summer 2016, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton sent the FAA a letter to advocate on behalf of the D.C. Fair Skies Coalition, stating that the shift of flight paths created “unbearable noise” in neighborhoods like Georgetown, Burleith, Foggy Bottom, Foxhall, Colony Hill, and Palisades, and was leading to an intensification of the sounds in Bellevue.

Last fall the FAA held public hearings on changing flight paths, but ultimately decided to keep them as is by wintertime.

At least one report tried to minimize the number of noise complaints Dulles and National received in 2015 by noting how a few individuals were responsible for a wide swath of the calls. According to the Mercatus Center, for instance, one person in Poolsville, Md. accounted for about 84 percent of total Dulles noise complaints in 2015.

According to this new data, the majority of individuals who call in complaints at both National and Dulles only do so once, as opposed to habitually: 51.3 percent at National and 64.5 percent at Dulles. Still, MWAA notes that the top five complainers equal about 52.2 percent of the total calls at National, and one person in Poolesville called in almost 63 percent of complaints regarding Dulles.

Even though Dulles is in Virginia, that Poolesville, Md. complainer helped boost Maryland’s numbers: 3,814 complaints about Dulles come from the Old Line State, including 3,794 from that one Poolesville household. Virginia accounts for the other 2,216 complaints, the vast majority of which are from two households in Falls Church.

For National, 26,563 of the total complaints came from D.C., followed by 9,094 in Virginia, and 988 from Maryland.

Last week, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan directed his state’s attorney general, Brian Frosh, to sue the FAA over all the airport noise at National and at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Hogan blames NextGen for “a significant increase in noise pollution for many of our citizens … [that] has made many Maryland families miserable in their own homes with louder and more frequent flights which now rattle windows and doors.”

Frosh responded in a statement that said his office “has been in conversations with both the Hogan administration and the FAA to address the issue.”

About 4,000 aircraft fly through the region’s skies daily, according to MWAA.

2016 Mwaa Annual Aircraft Noise Report Final by Rachel Kurzius on Scribd