If this is your first time visiting this site, please make sure to read the “Inaugural Blog Post“

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

Blog

Posted on

Review of the Port of Seattle’s fourth “StART” meeting — best one yet.

For some background on the nature of these meetings please see my blog post “Review of the Port of Seattle’s first ‘StART’ meeting.” I also attended the 2nd and 3rd meetings but their content didn’t really warrant the expenditure of time required to write a meaningful review, though both had their moments. The common weakness …

Continue reading “Review of the Port of Seattle’s fourth “StART” meeting — best one yet.”

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Review of the Port of Seattle’s first “StART” meeting.

Wednesday evening, Feb 28th 2018, I attended the public Kick-Off meeting of the “SEA-TAC Stakeholder Advisory Round Table”, referred to by the somewhat clumsy backronym “StART”. My expectations were shaped by a posting by Jeff Lewis on his aireform.com web site “FAA Forms Workgroups to solve their ‘People Problems’”. So I wasn’t terribly optimistic (the …

Continue reading “Review of the Port of Seattle’s first “StART” meeting.”

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One way the Port is trying to make their “Vashon Island Problem” go away.

[see 3/15/18 update at the bottom of this post for the current state of the Port’s site] The Port of Seattle has finally updated their “Flight Patterns” page sometime in the last few months: https://www.portseattle.org/projects/flight-patterns For years it had shown the pre-NextGen flight paths.  The old page showed the Southflow flight paths widely dispersed in a …

Continue reading “One way the Port is trying to make their “Vashon Island Problem” go away.”

About Us

This group was founded by David Goebel after studying the truth behind the FAA’s NextGen program.

David moved to Vashon Island in 1998 specifically because it was so rural, peaceful, and quiet.  One would occasionally notice a plane, but they were broadly dispersed and high in altitude.  In mid-2015 this all changed.  With NextGen every single arrival follows the exact same trajectory — as many as 30 an hour at its worst — and thousands of feet lower in altitude than before.   When SeaTac is in Southflow (most of the time), there is almost never a peaceful 15 minutes during the day.  Before, the songs of birds and the sound of wind rustling through the branches of trees predominated, now it’s as if an airport moved in next door.  It’s absolutely devastating.

If you wish to email, the address is ‘vashon’ at this domain.

Please send postal mail to:
NoRNP.org
PO Box 1250
Vashon, WA 98070

PS: Yes, this site is currently a bit, shall we say, stark.