The Sound of Convenience

The Sound at 11:50 ~ Buying a Ticket ~ Why Is the Plane Awake? ~ 

The Sound Ledger ~ It’s the Freight, Stupid ~ What Does Convenience Cost?

An apologetic flight taking off
overBergamo at night

The Sound at 11:50

Bergamo, 11:50 pm, a low roaring rumble. Then silence. Another one follows. Eventually things quiet down. At 5:30 am, it starts again.

What we first thought was an aberration of a late or early flight here and there, has become something we recognize as part of the acoustic day in Bergamo. We live near Milan Bergamo Airport, the third busiest airport in Italy. As the crow flies, we are about 3.5 kilometers from the runway. Most of the time we hardly think about it. At other times, especially late at night or early in the morning, it sounds like the airport is next door.

The sound isn't necessarily enormous. During the day it would probably disappear into everything else: cars, motorcycles, construction, voices from the street, bells. But at 11:50 at night the city has mostly gone quiet, and the sound of an airplane climbing out of Bergamo has the sky largely to itself. The same is true around 5:30 in the morning, when the first departures begin before much of the city has properly started its day.

After a while, we began to notice the pattern. Why so many planes at precisely these edges of the day? Who wants to leave Bergamo at six in the morning? Who wants to arrive somewhere close to midnight?

At first these were idle questions prompted by lying in bed listening to airplanes. Then we started looking for flights ourselves.

Buying a Ticket

One evening recently, we were looking at tickets on Ryanair. Let’s leave aside for the moment the dashed hope of truly low-cost flying unless you travel with a backpack and are prepared to wear five layers of clothes onto the plane.

I was looking at tickets to Pescara. Departure: 05:50. Helsinki: 06:30. Slide forward or back a day or two, and the choices often seemed to stay at the edges of the day: very early in the morning or very late at night. Sometimes after 11:00 pm.

These are just two examples. We’ve seen the same pattern with other destinations from Bergamo: departures and arrivals clustered around hours when most reasonable people are either still asleep or thinking about going to sleep.


There was probably a time when we would have shrugged and booked the flight anyway. A cheap ticket was a cheap ticket. Get up at 3:30 am, stumble into a taxi, arrive at the airport before sunrise, and recover later. These days, we are much less willing to organize an entire trip around an unpleasant flight time. We have changed days, changed destinations, chosen another airline, or simply abandoned an idea because the available flights were too early or too late.

And then came a realization.

The airplanes disturbing our sleep and the flights we routinely refuse to book might be part of the same phenomenon, viewed from opposite sides of the booking window.

At home, we hear the 11:50 departure climbing into the night and think, ah noisy. On the Ryanair website, we see the 05:50 departure and think, ah absolutely not.

The question became: why are flights scheduled at the edges of the day?

Why Is the Plane Awake?

Once we started noticing these flight times, we began wondering what was behind them.

Our first theory was obvious enough: perhaps the early-morning and late-night slots were cheaper. Ryanair is famously focused on keeping costs down, and its own annual reports say that it favors airports with competitive charges and negotiates aggressively over airport and handling costs. Secondary and regional airports can also offer fewer slot restrictions than larger primary airports.

So maybe 05:50 was simply the bargain hour.

Except, at least at Bergamo, we couldn't find evidence for that. The airport published charges and fee schedules don’t indicate any special discount for taking off at 5:50 in the morning or 23:50 at night. Ryanair certainly cares about airport costs, but "cheap airport" and "cheap time of day" are not the same thing.

Slot availability is another possible factor. A flight leaving Bergamo early may need to arrive at another airport at a particular time, and the same aircraft has to fit into a whole day's sequence of flights. There are crews, airport restrictions, passenger demand, and the schedule at the other end to consider. It isn't as simple as Ryanair sitting in Bergamo and deciding that 05:50 is a particularly amusing time to send us to Pescara.

But the explanation that we kept coming back to was aircraft utilization.

An airplane is an expensive piece of machinery, and it only earns money when it is being used. In its 2025 fiscal year, Ryanair reported an average of 9.57 flight hours per aircraft per day (see Ryanair Holdings plc, Annual Report FY2025, Key Performance Indicators section, available at https://investor.ryanair.com). The figure isn't uniquely high. Some airlines, including other low-cost carriers, report even greater utilization. But Ryanair reports it as a key operating statistic, which tells you something about how important it is to the business.

A long working day for an airplane has consequences. If you want to squeeze several flights out of the same aircraft, somebody has to be on the first flight of the day and somebody has to be on the last.

The 05:50 departure begins to make more sense when you stop thinking of it as our flight to Pescara and start thinking of it as the first movement in an aircraft's entire working day. That plane may return to Bergamo and head somewhere else, return and leave again. The unattractive hour for us may be what makes another flight possible later in the day.

In other words, the plane is awake because it has work to do. And suddenly the roar at 11:50 pm starts to make a little more sense.

The Sound Ledger

It turns out that in the bureaucracy of Italian aviation, our annoyance at the 11:50 pm flight has already been anticipated, has a formula, and is extensively measured.

Italy measures airport noise using an indicator called LVA (Livello di Valutazione del rumore Aeroportuale) (see SACBO / Milan Bergamo Airport environmental noise page), roughly the Airport Noise Assessment Level. LVA isn't the decibel reading of one airplane flying overhead. It is an overall measure designed specifically for airport noise. The annual LVA is calculated from 21 observation days: three weeks selected during different parts of the year, with the highest-traffic week used in each period. During those weeks, noise is measured continuously. See following Italy’s DM 31.10.1997 (article 1) for methodology for measuring airport noise.

From the May 2026 data (from the linked noise page above), Bagnatica and Seriate show some of the highest noise levels (mid-to-high 60s dB(A)). Bagnatica and Seriate are noisier because they sit directly under the runway 28 (heading toward 280 degrees) arrival path, and arrivals consistently come from the east. Given Bagnatica's position beneath the Runway 28 approach, much of that exposure comes from low-altitude arrivals from the east. Arrivals can come from the west (Runway 10, landing toward 100°) and land eastward at Bergamo, but it is rare.

 

Monitoring stations around the Bergamo airport

Bagnatica’s numbers tell a very human story about what it feels like to live under the runway 28 arrival path. In May, the station recorded a minimum LVAj of 58.3 dB(A) and a maximum of 70.1 dB(A)—an 11.8 dB spread that is not just a technical fluctuation but a substantial difference. Sound is logarithmic, and a 10 dB increase is often perceived, for comparable sounds, as roughly twice as loud. But LVAj is not a continuous background-noise reading: it summarizes the accumulated effect of aircraft events during the day. In other words, Bagnatica is not sitting under a steady 70 dB roar. What changes is the frequency, intensity, and cumulative impact of aircraft passing overhead.

I’m glad I'm not in bed in Bagnatica. But someone is.

And the LVA formula makes an important distinction between day and night.

For LVA calculations, daytime runs from 06:00 to 23:00 and nighttime from 23:00 to 06:00. Noise events occurring at night receive an additional penalty, meaning that—within the LVA index—a single nighttime aircraft event can influence the result roughly as much as ten comparable daytime events. Note: the Bagnatica number cited above are daily averages. The day/night numbers are not published. A nighttime LVAn could theoretically exceed 70 dB(A) at Bagnatica, but the bulletin’s published numbers would not show it — they only show the combined daily LVAj.

The airplane at 11:50 pm isn't literally ten times louder than the airplane at 11:50 am. The multiplier is there because context matters. At noon, an aircraft competes with traffic, voices, construction, motorcycles and the general noise of a city going about its business. Near midnight, the same aircraft has the stage largely to itself. More importantly, people are trying to sleep.

Bergamo has quite an elaborate system for keeping track of all this. SACBO, the company that operates Milan Bergamo Airport, runs eight permanent noise-monitoring stations, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, supplemented by two mobile stations. The system combines microphone readings with radar tracks, weather information, and flight logs so that individual noise events can be associated with aircraft movements. The results are analyzed monthly, published publicly, and periodically checked by ARPA Lombardia.

Three of the fixed stations are actually within the Comune di Bergamo: Via Linneo, Via Quasimodo and Via Colognola ai Colli. The other five are in surrounding communities: Orio al Serio, Bagnatica, Seriate, Grassobbio and Azzano San Paolo.

In other words, it’s not just me hearing the noise, there are microphones scattered around listening to it too.

Bergamo also has Noise Abatement Procedures intended to reduce the impact of aircraft on surrounding communities. Of particular importance for the city are restrictions on nighttime departures using Runway 28, the westward departure direction, during the 23:00 to 06:00 period. Exceptions can be made for weather, unusual traffic conditions or operational safety, and ENAC can sanction airlines for violations of the procedures.

So, it would be unfair to say that Bergamo does nothing about aircraft noise. In fact, when it comes to monitoring and mitigation, the airport appears to take the issue quite seriously.

But monitoring noise and preventing noise are two different things. This is where a few comparisons with other European airports heavily associated with low-cost flying make that distinction clearer.

• At Brussels South Charleroi Airport (curfew info: https://www.brussels-charleroi-airport.com/en/bscas-environmental-policy), there is a curfew between 23:00 and 06:30, together with a quota system for late operations, restrictions on the noisiest aircraft, noise thresholds and fines when airlines exceed them. The surrounding region has also carried out a large soundproofing program for affected buildings.
• At Eindhoven Airport, scheduled flights have not been allowed after 23:00 since October 2020, apart from limited provisions for delayed arrivals. The airport also caps the total number of flights and charges lower airport fees for quieter aircraft.
• London Stansted, one of Ryanair's largest bases, takes yet another approach. It continues to allow nighttime flying, but the British government imposes both a limit on the number of aircraft movements and a separate noise quota during the core nighttime period. The current regime, running from October 2025 through October 2028, retains those controls. In other words, even if quieter aircraft make more flights possible, there is still a ledger keeping track of both the number of flights and the amount of noise they collectively produce.

Bergamo has chosen a somewhat different balance. It measures extensively, publishes the measurements, uses special flight procedures and restricts certain nighttime runway operations. But it does not have the broad nighttime curfew found at Charleroi or the prohibition on scheduled flights after 23:00 used at Eindhoven. Compared with those airports, Bergamo seems stronger on mitigation than on prevention.

And that seems important. The 05:50 departure isn't simply an unavoidable fact of low-cost aviation. Similar airports have drawn the line in different places.

How much of the airline's long working day a community is willing to hear is, at least partly, a choice.

It’s the Freight, Stupid

At this point, we thought we had the story more or less figured out. We live near a major low-cost airline hub. For example, Ryanair sells tickets at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight. Its airplanes work long days. We hear airplanes at 05:50 in the morning and close to midnight.

Case closed.

Except it wasn't.

While looking through SACBO's noise information, we came across reports of nighttime departures from Runway 28. Runway 28 sends aircraft westward (280 degrees), in the general direction of Bergamo, and its use for departures between 23:00 and 06:00 is restricted. SACBO publishes lists of the flights authorized to use this runway during those hours because of weather, air-traffic conditions, safety or other permitted circumstances.

We opened one of the reports, from 2020, expecting to see Ryanair flight numbers everywhere. Instead, a surprising number of flights were cargo and courier operations.

That required a small recalibration of our theory.

The report doesn't tell us that all, or even most, nighttime flights at Bergamo are cargo flights. It covers a specific subset of nighttime departures from a specific runway, and 2020 was hardly a normal year for aviation. But it was enough to remind us that the roar we hear in bed cannot automatically be blamed on the person flying to Pescara for €29.99.

There is another wrinkle in using 2020 as our window into freight traffic. DHL, once a major courier presence at Bergamo, was in the process of moving its air hub operations to Malpensa, where its new international hub began operating in 2020 and was formally inaugurated the following year. Cargo traffic at Bergamo subsequently fell substantially. Today, UPS is the airport's principal established courier operator, flying from Bergamo to its European hub in Cologne and other destinations. There are also smaller logistics operators handling, among other things, e-commerce traffic between China and Italy.

For reasons we haven't figured out, 2020 also appears to be the last year for which SACBO published these Runway 28 nighttime lists. Another small mystery for a lay person to wonder about.

SACBO has stated that Bergamo’s future in cargo lies in becoming a specialized e‑commerce logistics hub — focusing on fast, efficient courier operations rather than competing with Malpensa’s large‑scale freight volumes. (L’Eco di Bergamo, Bergamo News)

Freight has its own reasons for liking the night because express cargo works particularly well while the rest of us are sleeping. Packages collected during the day can be flown to sorting hubs overnight, moved again, and arrive somewhere else in time for another day's deliveries. For passenger airlines, the edges of the day help extend the productive life of an aircraft. For express freight, the night itself is part of the product. Yesterday's package is supposed to become today's delivery.

Cargo operations can also have different acoustic characteristics. Freighter fleets tend to include older aircraft than passenger fleets, in part because passenger aircraft often spend a second career carrying freight. Older generations of aircraft generally have larger noise footprints than their newer counterparts. At Bergamo, meanwhile, a growing share of passenger traffic is flown by newer aircraft such as Ryanair's Boeing 737 MAX, which SACBO's own measurements show to be several decibels quieter than the older 737-800.

It would be tempting to turn this into another simple explanation: cargo airplanes are old, heavy and loud; passenger airplanes are new, light and quiet. A cargo aircraft isn't necessarily heavier than a passenger aircraft, and carrying freight doesn't inherently require more thrust or make an airplane noisier. Aircraft type, age, engine technology, actual takeoff weight, weather and operating procedure all matter.

What is different is the timing. Cargo and express-delivery networks have a strong economic reason to use hours that passenger airlines and passengers might prefer to avoid.

And so, our neat story about the sound of low-cost flying became messier.

Some of the early-morning sound really may be the Ryanair flight we saw on the booking screen. Some of the nighttime roar may be freight moving through the European logistics system. Both use Bergamo Airport. Both have reasons to stretch activity toward hours when much of the surrounding community is asleep.

The common denominator isn't Ryanair and other low-cost passenger airlines after all. It's an airport working around the clock.

What Does Convenience Cost?

By now, our original theory had become considerably less tidy. Maybe what we are hearing isn't simply the sound of low-cost flying. Maybe it is the sound of convenience.

We want inexpensive flights to Helsinki. We also want the thing we ordered online to appear at our door tomorrow. Neither expectation seems particularly remarkable anymore. Behind both, however, are complicated systems trying to squeeze time out of the day.

Online shopping in Italy has changed enormously. The Osservatorio eCommerce B2C at Politecnico di Milano/Netcomm report that Italian online purchases were €16.6 billion in 2015. In 2016, product purchases alone were €9 billion. For 2025, the same research group put total e-commerce above €62.3 billion, with products above €40 billion.

Not all those packages fly, of course. Most don't. And we can't draw a straight line from Italian e-commerce growth to freight traffic at Bergamo. In fact, cargo flights at the airport are much less numerous today than they were before DHL moved its courier operation away from Bergamo in 2020. But overnight freight remains part of the airport's activity, and the larger logistics system exists because we use it.

It's easy to complain about a Ryanair departure at 05:50 when we don't want to take it. It's also easy to complain about an airplane passing overhead at midnight. It's harder when we recognize ourselves somewhere in the demand that keeps the entire system running.

Bergamo Airport works hard. In 2025, SACBO handled nearly 17 million passengers, more than 104,000 aircraft movements, and about 24,500 tonnes of freight. The airport operates officially on a 24‑hour basis, and its development planning — as reflected in ENAC’s approved masterplan — is built around distributing annual traffic across the full H24 operating day. (See SACBO).

But there is another piece of infrastructure immediately beside it: Bergamo, where people live.

That brings us back to the question we stumbled into while listening to airplanes in bed: where should the productive day of an airport end and the sleeping day of a city begin?

One obvious answer would be a curfew. But Bergamo doesn't have one.

We wondered whether that was simply because Bergamo has only one runway and needs to squeeze as much traffic as possible through it. A single runway certainly creates pressure to use the available hours efficiently. Yet it doesn't make nighttime operations inevitable.

Eindhoven has one runway and closes to scheduled flights at night. Charleroi also operates a single runway and normally closes between 23:00 and 06:30. Stansted, another huge Ryanair base with one runway, remains open through the night but operates under government limits on both the number and cumulative noise of nighttime flights.

So, Bergamo's 24-hour operation isn't simply an engineering necessity imposed by having one strip of asphalt. It is also a choice about how that infrastructure is used.

We couldn't find an official SACBO or ENAC statement saying, in so many words, Bergamo has no curfew because... And perhaps there isn't one simple answer. A curfew would reduce operating flexibility. It would constrain passenger schedules and overnight freight. It could push flights into already busy periods immediately before and after the closure, move some activity to other airports, and ultimately make some services more expensive or less attractive.

Those are real costs.

But allowing flights through the nighttime has costs too. They simply appear somewhere else on the ledger.

There are ways of drawing the line short of closing the airport. Night flights can be capped, as at Stansted. Airlines can pay more to operate at noise-sensitive hours or with noisier aircraft. Airports can give preference to newer, quieter planes. Certain runway directions can be restricted, as Bergamo already does. Homes can be insulated and noise continuously monitored, also things Bergamo already does.

In other words, there isn't a choice between having an airport and not having an airport. There are many choices in between. And that's perhaps where this investigation finally landed.

Low-cost airlines aren't the villain. Freight isn't the villain. Nor are those of us who like inexpensive flights and packages arriving at the door. The interesting question is how we divide the benefits and costs of all that convenience.

Commerce would happily use all 24 hours of the day. Human beings tend to reserve a few of them for sleeping.

At 11:50 pm in Bergamo, we can sometimes hear where that line has been drawn.