Brunswick County, NC Noise Ordinances: Aircraft Noise (2026)

Sec. 1-9-565(a)(11), the exemptions section of the county's Noise Ordinance (Article VIII, Chapter 1-9), states that "all noises coming from the normal operations of aircraft (not including scale model aircraft) and all noises emanating from any airport within the county" are exempt from the specific prohibitions in Sec. 1-9-563. curfew for loudspeakers and amplified sound, the distance-based vehicle noise standard, and every other numeric or time-based limit in the ordinance simply do not reach aircraft engine noise, flyovers, or noise generated at a general aviation airport inside the county.

The carve-out is narrow in one respect: it covers only "normal operations," and it explicitly does not extend to scale-model aircraft, meaning a remote-controlled model plane or drone making noise late at night is still assessed under the ordinary plainly-audible standard in Sec. 1-9-563 rather than the exemption. The county also exempts several other categories in the same subsection, including normal railroad noise, noise from authorized emergency aircraft and vehicles, and industrial facility noise, showing that aviation and transportation infrastructure noise generally sits outside this county's civil and criminal noise enforcement scheme.

Because federal and state aviation authorities, not county ordinance, set the rules that actually govern flight operations and airport noise abatement, a resident near a county airfield has no local noise-ordinance remedy for aircraft noise itself, though the county's general nuisance and land-use tools remain separate from this specific noise-article exemption.