Residents living around the nation’s busiest airports can now see in near ‘real time’ the exact location of inbound and outbound flights as well as the noise being emitted by those aircraft.

The information is available on the new WebTrak site – www.airservicesaustralia.com/webtrak – which I officially launched today at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport.

WebTrak was foreshadowed in the Aviation Green Paper which I released only last week.

Communities around the airports of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Coolangatta, Brisbane and Cairns will for the first time be able to access near ‘real time’ information on aircraft movements.

Residents can now log on and find out for themselves what’s happening around their airport, including monitoring the height and proximity of arriving and departing aircraft.

WebTrak features flight path information from incoming and outgoing aircraft as well as the noise data captured from monitors strategically located within the communities surrounding the airports.

In ‘Live’ mode, residents can view current operations (delayed by 40 minutes for security reasons) within the vicinity of the airport; while replay mode provides flight information and noise readings for the previous week.

Our airports are vital to the national economy and it is important that the communities around them have access to timely information about their operations.

We are using technology to make the operations at our major airports more transparent, one of the themes of the Aviation Green Paper.

WebTrak is part of the world’s largest, nationwide integrated Noise and Flight Path System – the product of a $20 million investment by the government-owned corporation which manages the nation’s skies: Airservices Australia.

The information on the state of the art website is sourced from the air traffic control radars displaying movements within 55 kilometres of the airport and up to a height of 3,000 metres. The project also involved the introduction of more portable noise monitors and the replacement of more than forty existing noise monitors.

Upgrades to the service in April will further improve the public’s access to this information.

Residents with concerns about aircraft noise can contact a national hotline: 1800 802 584 (free call) or 1300 302 240 (cost of a local call).