[gbear605]

Suppose that there is a helicopter overhead that you (and the five thousand people around you) would pay a dollar to get rid of. If you tax that flight $5000 and distribute it to the 5000 people who could hear that helicopter, then you get that dollar and you're just as happy as if that flight didn't exist. If you tax that flight $10,000, and distribute it to the 5000 people, then you get two dollars, making you happier than in the scenario where the flight didn't take place.

Obviously, it's impossible to give that money to the people who heard the helicopter, but if you amortize all the flights in the area (say, all of LA) over all the people who live there, and reduce their taxes by that amount, then financially it works out the same. That still leaves some problems (complexity in setting a new tax on helicopter flights, differing value on not-having-helicopter-flights, difficulty of estimation, and so on), and many people want to discourage the mentality of "you can throw money at a problem to get rid of it", but conceptually it seems plausible for taxing the flight to be better than banning it entirely.

[holy_city]

See I don't like this attitude towards tax incentives because you're missing the tree for the woods.

This solution pays me for my inconvenience. It doesn't prevent the inconvenience in the first place or from happening again.

[big_onion]

In other words, your point is that there is no dollar value for which you will allow the nuisance. As a phonophobe, this would be my stance as well

[ryacko]

That already exists, housing will cost less near airports, which in turn reduces property taxes or rents for people living near the airport.

[kd5bjo]

This misses the differential impact of the disruption on different people. Freelancers that do audio recording, for example, may need to throw out and redo some of their work when it gets interrupted by a helicopter flyby. You either need to identify these people and five them a higher proportion of the tax revues to compensate, or price your tax/redistribution high enough that these high-value individuals are fairly compensated.