DeKalb County, GA Noise Ordinances: Aircraft Noise (2026)

Sec. 6-85 of the DeKalb County Code, governing DeKalb-Peachtree Airport (PDK) flight operations, states: "In all cases takeoffs and landings over populated areas shall be kept at a minimum in the interest of public safety and convenience. " It sits in Division 2, Flight Operations, alongside the county's standard departure procedure at Sec. to reach an altitude of five hundred (500) feet before making a turn to depart the traffic pattern," the same climb-out pilots use to satisfy the noise-minimization duty in Sec. 6-85. Sec.

6-37 fixes the scope of the whole article: "This article applies to the airport," meaning DeKalb-Peachtree Airport as defined in Sec. 6-36, so this noise rule has no bearing on private airstrips or on aircraft merely overflying the county en route elsewhere. Enforcement runs through the airport director and the flight-pattern authority given by Sec. 6-87(a), which lets the director set and revise traffic patterns county pilots must fly. Because the standard is "kept at a minimum" rather than a decibel ceiling, compliance is judged operationally, by whether a pilot chose the pattern and climb profile available to reduce overflight of housing, not by a sound-level reading.