Norfolk Forward From Norfolk City Council Member Jeremy McGee

Runway 5 departures over Ocean View

Every Norfolk International departure off Runway 5 since January 2024, measured one flight at a time from its radar track: how many turn left early and cut across the Ocean View neighborhoods at low altitude.

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Runway 5 climbouts on the map, by day

Every Runway 5 climbout on the chosen day, one line per flight, over the neighborhood outlines used in the analysis. Tap a track for the flight. Red tracks are the counted flights; the small red dot is where that flight began its turn.

Counted Other left turns Straight or right 65+ DNL zones

Shaded: Ocean View residential land from East Beach to Willoughby (the “homes” polygon). Dashed outline: East Ocean View / East Beach. Thick black line: Runway 5/23. Tracks are FlightAware positions, about one every 16 seconds in the climb, or adsb.lol positions, about every two seconds, on days marked as such below the map. Only the last seven days with tracks are kept on this page.

Military overflights

Military aircraft crossing East Ocean View / East Beach below 3,000 ft, from the adsb.lol community archive on the days it covers the area well. Shown the same way as the airline departures above: how many, when, how low, which aircraft, and where they flew on a given day.

Military tracks on the map, by day

Every military aircraft that crossed East Ocean View / East Beach below 3,000 ft on the chosen day, over the same neighborhood outlines as the climbout map. The faint line is the aircraft’s whole path through the area; the bold part is where it was below 3,000 ft; the dot is its lowest point over the homes. Tap a track for the aircraft. The buttons are the most recent sampled days with military traffic; the list reaches every other day.

Helicopters Fixed-wing

How many, when and how low

Military aircraft over the homes

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Per sampled day

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Helicopters

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Below 1,500 ft over the homes

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Per sampled day, by month

Helicopters per dayFixed-wing per day

By time of day

Lowest altitude over the homes

Aircraft types

Caveats

Counts come from the free adsb.lol archive on days it covers the area well (the sampled days). Aircraft that do not broadcast ADS-B are invisible to every source used here, so these are floors, not totals.
There is no usable baseline before 2026: the community archive did not see low-altitude traffic here before late 2025. Whether the spring-to-fall decline is a trend or the Navy’s training calendar cannot be told from ten months; the Navy’s own flight records would answer that.

Arrivals: do landing aircraft fly low over the neighborhoods too?

The other sections of this page are about departures. This one counts every landing on Runway 23 (which comes in over the Little Creek inlet and the East Beach tip) and Runway 5 (which comes in over the city from the southwest), and asks how low each one got over the Ocean View homes on its way in. The map shows the approach paths on the chosen day: the bold part of a track is where it was below 3,000 ft over the homes, the dot its lowest point there. Tap a track for the flight.

Landings a day

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Below 3,000 ft over homes, per day

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Runway 23 finals over the East Beach tip, per day

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Airline jets below 3,000 ft over homes

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Runway 23 landings Runway 5 landings Also the ones that stayed above 3,000 ft over homes Lowest point of every low landing since January

Tracks are adsb.lol positions, about every ten seconds, for the last 15 minutes of each approach. The buttons are the most recent days in the archive plus the most recent days on which Runway 23 took at least half the landings, so both approaches are always on the map. Grey: homes. Dashed outline: East Ocean View / East Beach. Thick black line: Runway 5/23.

Low cuts across the neighborhoods, 2026 to date

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Flights counted since Jan 2024

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Per day, averaged over the year

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5 – 7 am departure bank, this year

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What counts. A Runway 5 departure is counted as a low cut across the neighborhoods when it turns left, then flies at least 0.6 miles over Ocean View homes (East Beach to Willoughby) while below 3,000 ft. Clipping the East Beach tip on the straight-out climb, or crossing Willoughby at 5,000 ft, does not count. The definition is fixed; every month is measured the same way.

Share of departures by month

Percent of each month’s Runway 5 departures that turned left and then crossed Ocean View homes. The red line is the headline measure (below 3,000 ft); the navy line counts the same crossings at any altitude.

Left turn, 0.6 mi+ over homes, below 3,000 ft (counted)Same, at any altitude

Counted flights per month

Hairline at 2 October 2025: the FAA replaced vector departures with three RNAV departure procedures. None of them defines where the left turn happens; it remains an air traffic control vector each time. Before the change 8.2 % of departures were counted; after it, 8.8 %.

Time of day: the 5 – 7 am bank has tripled

Share of Runway 5 departures counted, by time of day (local) and year. The early-morning airline bank is about 2,000 departures a year and the period most likely to wake people.

How many a day, and how often Runway 5 is in use

Runway choice follows the wind, so the number of flights residents hear swings by month even when the share does not. Per-day figures count only days with Runway 5 departures.

Runway 5 departures per day

All Runway 5 departuresCounted (low cut across homes)

Runway 5 share of all ORF departures

Percent of the month’s departures that used Runway 5

About half of all ORF departures use Runway 5 across a year, from under 40 % in some summer months to over 80 % in the fall. August to October are the heavy months.

Who: light and corporate aircraft lead; among airlines, the slow climbers

Operators with at least 30 Runway 5 departures since January 2024, ranked by counted flights. Private, corporate and training aircraft climb slowly and are vectored left early.

The 65 DNL noise area

Airport noise maps are drawn in DNL: the average sound energy over a whole day, with a 10 dB penalty on anything between 10 pm and 7 am. The FAA draws its line at 65 DNL. Amber: the 65 DNL area for ORF on the City of Norfolk’s map. Red dots: where each counted departure was lowest over the homes.

Data notes

How each flight was classified, where the data comes from, and what it cannot tell you.

Definition

Runway 5 departure: the track shows the aircraft on the 05/23 runway line, below 1,500 ft, on the runway heading, climbing at least 500 ft in the next 90 seconds. Runway used is also confirmed against FlightAware’s runway field.
Turn start: the first point past the runway end where the aircraft’s track differs from the runway heading by more than 15°.
Homes: Ocean View residential land from East Beach to Willoughby, built from OpenStreetMap building footprints with gaps closed and water removed. A subset is tracked for East Ocean View / East Beach alone (east of Pretty Lake Avenue to the Little Creek inlet).
Counted (“low cut across the neighborhoods”): the departure turns left, then flies at least 0.6 miles (1 km) over Ocean View homes, and is below 3,000 ft while over them. Measured only on the part of the path after the turn begins. Moving the distance threshold between half a mile and 0.6 miles changes the annual result by less than one point.
Time-of-day bands use local time of the departure: midnight to 4:59 am, the 5 – 6:59 am bank, 7 am to 9:59 pm, and 10 pm to midnight.

Sources

FlightAware AeroAPI historical departure records and position tracks for every ORF departure from 1 January 2024 (— Runway 5 climbouts with a usable track, 99 % of those recorded).
adsb.lol community ADS-B archive, used as an independent check (on 217 well-covered days, 13,415 matched flights: turn direction agreed on 95 %, turn-start distance within about 70 ft at the median) and as the only source for the military transit counts. It has no low-altitude coverage at ORF before late 2025, so it is not used alone for the headline.
Neighborhood geometry from OpenStreetMap; runway ends from OurAirports; departure procedures from FAA d-TPP charts.
Noise zones: the City of Norfolk GIS Planning and Zoning map service, AICUZ › Noise Levels layer (gisshare.norfolk.gov, downloaded 31 October 2026; the city’s AICUZ map of August 2020 draws the same polygons and credits the data to the US Navy; the layer does not state the study or year behind the ORF-shaped zones). Address counts inside the zones use the city GIS Addresses layer (active addresses, same date). The FAA-accepted contour and the housing-unit counts are from the airport’s Environmental Assessment for the Runway 14/32 Closure (final, 2025) and its Noise Technical Report (Landrum & Brown, June 2024). DNL arithmetic on this page assumes about 90 dB SEL per pass, roughly an A320-class departure 1,500 ft overhead, from the FAA’s noise-power-distance data.
Validated against five departures a resident recorded on 26 October 2026: the three the resident described (turns at 650 – 1,000 ft, crossing 1.2 – 4.8 miles of homes at about 1,000 ft) are counted; the straight-out departure and the right turn are not.

Limits

FlightAware altitudes are pressure altitudes reported by the aircraft, accurate to about ±200 ft. adsb.lol altitudes are GPS (geometric) and read about 100 – 150 ft higher here, so a flight near the 3,000 ft line can fall on either side of it depending on the source. Turn start is located to within about a third of a mile.
Per-day figures divide by days that had Runway 5 departures, so they are higher than a calendar-day average in months when the other runway was in use.
Military counts are floors: aircraft not broadcasting ADS-B are invisible, and only well-covered archive days are sampled.
This page is refreshed by hand after the new days’ departure lists and tracks are brought in. The date at the top is the last day in the data.

Files

summary.json — every number on this page. geo.json — the polygons. tracks/ — the recent days’ climbouts as GeoJSON. noise_zones.json — the noise zones as GeoJSON, the lowest point of every counted flight, and the zone summary. arrivals.json — the landings since January 2026: the arrivals summary and the lowest point over the homes of every landing below 3,000 ft. arrivals_tracks/ — the approach paths on the map, one GeoJSON file per day.