Before the pandemic ravaged the airline industry, a typical summer afternoon involved a string of jetliners descending over John Farrell's south Minneapolis home every two minutes or so.
The din usually dissipated about three hours later, around dinnertime.
"It was noisy," said Farrell, who lives under the approach of the airport's south parallel runway.
The COVID-19 outbreak may have resulted in a devastating global health crisis, but the unexpected side effect is that complaints related to noisy aircraft landing and departing from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) have fallen precipitously. And that has given some residents who live near the airport's flight path some blessed quiet this summer — a chance to converse uninterrupted at barbecues and to open windows at night without a Boeing 737 roaring overhead.
It's an unprecedented type of calm, too. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the country's commercial airspace was shut down for three days. But, as the Metropolitan Airports Commission's (MAC) Brad Juffer notes, "things started up pretty quickly" afterward as safety measures were put in place to appease jittery travelers.
As the pandemic took hold this spring, "it was wildly different for the first couple of weeks," Farrell said of the noise levels.
Helen Leslie, who has lived in Eagan for more than 30 years, is a bit more direct: "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, it was so lovely."
At the height of the outbreak this spring, air traffic declined by up to 75% at MSP, which served 40 million passengers last year, a historic high.