Mission:
This site is intended to help educate the public on the environmental impact of the FAA’s “NextGen” program which includes, among other things, moving away from random vectorized approaches to an airport, to every single aircraft taking the exact same approach, even a hundred flight miles from the airport. Noise impacts that used to be randomly dispersed over an entire region are now focused in a single GPS enforced razor sharp line of misery. Again, this happens when planes may still have almost a hundred miles to fly until landing, not just on final approach when planes must align in order to land on the runway. In some cases, this line has cut through rural communities where people settled specifically because it was so quiet and peaceful. The technology which enables this focused noise on the ground is called RNP: Required Navigational Performance. Thus the name of this site.
Note that RNP has legitimate uses, such as navigating through treacherous terrain and/or bad weather, but using it to focus half of all arrivals over a single populated line at low altitude is an abuse of the technology.
BUG: The ‘bot’ detection for leaving comments on posts is broken and often flags real people at bots. The ISP says there is no way to turn it off. I’m still looking for a solution. Sorry.
NEWS:
Vashon Island Fair Skies is now a WA non-profit corporation! Over time this site may merge with http://www.VashonIslandFairSkies.org or cover aspects less Vashon-centric dealing with more general NextGen issues around the country..
We were at Vashon Island’s 109th annual Strawberry Festival the weekend of July 21st and 22nd. We had displays and handouts with information, and an exhibit demonstrating how to use a Raspberry Pi computer to build your own plane tracking system. We also launched a petition campaign to the Port Of Seattle Commission to take the first step in restoring the peace of our rural Island.
On Saturday July 28th, 2018 from 3pm to 4pm, a meeting on recent news, Strawberry Festival wrap-up , and an update from the petition campaign was held on Vashon Island at the Land Trust Building: 10014 SW Bank Road.
On March 31st, 2018 a meeting on the impact of the FAA’s NextGen program, and recent updates, was held on Vashon Island at the Land Trust Building: 10014 SW Bank Road. The slides are here: VashonMeetingSlidesMarch2018
The slide deck from the 11/5/2017 meeting (with lots of useful links) is here: Vashon Noise Meeting Slides