AMSTELVEEN, Netherlands — Winnie de Wit is very familiar with jet engines — between 400 and 700 airplanes roar over her house in Assendelft, a small town 30 kilometers north of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, every day and night.
Enraged local neighbors want the noise cut. Airlines and the city want it to remain a crucial hub. The fight has entangled the central government, Amsterdam’s city administration, the courts, local activists, airlines and business groups, the European Commission and even the United States.
Meanwhile, other European airports are looking on nervously, worrying they’ll be next as the aviation industry runs into growing climate and environmental challenges.
The battle over the airport has become so bitter that it’s even given rise to a new Dutch word, schiphollen, meaning “manipulation, lies and distortion of facts,” something people living near the airport say they’ve been subjected to.
It all comes down to noise.
Despite being located only 15 kilometers from the heart of Amsterdam, Schiphol is the EU’s busiest airport by flight numbers, last year seeing 473,814 flights. The government is planning to set a limit of 478,000 flights as of later this year — and the European Commission has given its conditional approval.
But residents say that’s still way too many.
De Wit says that the noise is affecting her quality of life.
“Once I took my granddaughter outside to play, and in 15 minutes I counted 14 planes,” she said, showing on her phone a list of aircraft recorded with an app developed by grassroots anti-noise groups.
According to Schiphol Airport, 142,400 people were seriously disturbed by airport noise in 2019, while 17,522 had severely disturbed sleep. Anti-noise NGOs say the real numbers are much higher.
But the airline industry worries that a low flight limit will choke off growth at Schiphol and harm their bottom lines.
“We’re not shying away from the desire of the Dutch state to reduce noise. We just want it done following a logical way of doing it, that does not disproportionately hit us,” said Benjamin Smith, CEO of Air France-KLM, speaking in late March.
The airport is responsible for about 1 percent of Dutch GDP and over 100,000 jobs. The sector is so important that King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, a licensed commercial pilot, occasionally flies with KLM as a guest pilot.
The far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders — the largest party in parliament — campaigned on a pro-Schiphol platform in the 2023 election. The airport “should continue to grow,” the party said.
But if politicians don’t come up with a solution, it may be imposed on the government by the courts. Dutch judges have a track record of making drastic decisions affecting entire sectors, such as agriculture, in order to protect the environment and people’s health.
Former Prime Minister Mark Rutte tried to solve the problem in 2023 by imposing a cap of 460,000 flights. But that sparked a backlash from both the EU and the U.S., and his government announced a hurried retreat after failing to get the Commission’s approval.
Tech fixes
The industry feels the new proposed limit of 478,000 is far too low, and took the matter to court. Rather than limit flights, it argues that advances in airplane and engine design will do enough to cut noise.
“The government says, ‘We want 20 percent less noise.’ The aircraft that we have bought, and that [manufacturers] are going to produce, [are] 20 percent less noisy. So we don’t understand why there’s an issue and why there has to be reduction in slots,” Air France-KLM’s Smith said.
Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, which operates only a few routes from Schiphol, is even more optimistic.
“The new aircraft we’re buying from Boeing … [are] 50 percent quieter” than previous models, he said.
But Roberto Merino-Martinez, an aeronautics and aircraft noise researcher at the Delft University of Technology, said such a reduction won’t halve the total sound emitted by planes that can be heard by the human ear, and that promising a percentage reduction is often a “red flag,” given the logarithmic nature of noise measurement.
In its recent decision on the flight cap, the Commission set a number of conditions for its introduction. It urged the government to fully consider “the potential of fleet renewal to reduce aircraft noise” or other noise-reducing flight procedures, such as innovative landing and navigation techniques.
The ambiguous decision disappointed many locals.
The Commission’s demands “are exactly what the industry lobbies put forward all the time, almost literally. That’s quite disturbing,” said Stefan Molenaar, who lives in Assendelft, the same town as de Wit.
“The European Union is a very good institution for the consumers. But it’s not always a good institution for citizens,” said Matt Poelmans, a retired civil servant who lives about 30 kilometers south of Schiphol. About 400 airplanes fly over his house every day, and he has installed a special microphone on his roof to prove the noise pollution.
“Living comes before flying,” reads the banner in Dutch that Poelmans has carried at several demonstrations against the country’s government — which residents say is too accommodating to the airline industry.
Roaring engines
The government has a brutal message for people bothered by the noise: “I say to local residents: don’t expect Schiphol to disappear. If it’s going to define your life, you have to ask yourself if it’s healthy to stay here,” Dutch Infrastructure Minister Barry Madlener said in January.
The industry also questions the impact of capping the number of flights even at the current fairly high level.
“If you have somebody who wakes up [due to] the approach of an aircraft during the night, does it really matter if it’s eight times an hour or seven times an hour?” asked Seth van Straten, vice president for mainport strategy at KLM.
Molenaar is one of the citizens who took the Dutch government to court, which found the state to be in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects a person’s private and family life and home.
That ruling prompted Madlener, who declined POLITICO’s request for an interview, to propose the flight cap to the European Commission.
To comply with the Commission’s request to limit airport capacity only as a last resort, the government will impose differentiated airport charges to encourage airlines to use their quietest aircraft.
“Put together, the government expects these measures to have a significant impact: 15 percent less people experiencing severe noise nuisance by November 2025,” said Richard Funnekotter, spokesperson for the Ministry of Infrastructure, in a written response.
Skeptical public
It’s not the first time Molenaar has heard such promises.
“A lot of people don’t believe our government anymore, so they stopped complaining because they feel schiphollen,” he said.
While the industry is bridling at the limits, locals and the Amsterdam city government feel they’re too generous.
“We want a shrinkage to 400,000 flights and the closure [of the airport] at night,” said Amsterdam’s Deputy Mayor Hester van Buren, who is in talks with local governments across Europe to push the EU to do more about aircraft noise.
Natuur en Milieu, a Dutch green NGO, wants the airport to rethink its business model and focus less on transfer passengers — who account for about a third of traffic — and instead concentrate on serving the Dutch national market.
If the cap does go into effect, it would be a big victory for the activists who have fought Schiphol for decades, said Bert van Mourik, a program leader with the NGO.
“Finally, for the first time in Europe, there’s an airport where a reduction has been put in place. It’s not the reduction we wanted. It doesn’t make that big of a change at the moment, but we can still be happy with that … I do celebrate it as a victory,” he said.
That’s a message that will be heard loud and clear in cities like Paris, Brussels, Dublin, Madrid and Warsaw, where growing airports are clashing with local activists.
But not everyone wants fewer airplanes flying out of Schiphol.
Not far from the Polderbaan, Schiphol’s busiest runway, is a plane-spotting area that attracts tourists and photographers.
“Some people are crazy,” said Gerard, waiting with his professional reflex camera to snap his favorite aircraft, when asked about the noise complaints. “I want more planes, they are not enough.”
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