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 desks were even arrange in the exact same way), but I did want to keep an open mind.
The committee members included three people (1 government & 2 citizen) from each of the directly adjoining communities/cities of Burien, Des Moines, Federal Way, Normandy Park, SeaTac and Tukwila, as well as representatives from Alaska Airlines, Delta Airlines, Port Of Seattle officials, and two FAA representatives: Randy Fiertz and Joelle Briggs. The meeting was open to the public, and somewhere around a dozen people showed up (traffic was terrible so more may have filtered in after the meeting started). Alaska & Delta both sent substitute representatives, leading to the impression that those two guys drew the short straws.
My biggest fear was that the citizen committee members would be stooges for the FAA, handpicked for their docile subservience to officials. This wasn’t the case. I left convinced they were all genuine citizens, and of course it would have been hard to fake the city government employees using impostors. However they were not air traffic experts (with an exception, more on that later) and I’m really concerned they will simply accept misleading and sometimes doctored information presented to them without independently confirming what they are told by Port/FAA officials. These are very technical subjects and it is not easy building a deep technical understand of the issues, but they really must.
The meeting started with a weird request by Sea-Tac Airport Director Lance Lyttle that all the members of the committee arm wrestle with their neighbor, but that points were awarded based on how many times each person ‘won’. The idea, obviously, was to encourage people to not actually arm wrestle and instead just go back and forth as quickly as possible. It reminded me of silly “team building” workshops many people have to endure at their work, though luckily this only lasted a minute instead of a week. It was awkward and not a good way to start the meeting IMHO.
Lance Lyttle gave a slide show presentation which looked partly video based, i.e. precisely timed instead of manually going through the slides, but I may have just not noticed him using a clicker. I unexpectedly found it interesting and can say I learned some things. The most interesting idea was that large airports like SeaTac are actually mini self-contained cities. They have their own police, fire, utilities, and maintenance departments, their own restaurants & shopping malls, communication infrastructures, and governing structures. It was an interesting way to think about airports that I hadn’t considered before. It had almost nothing to do with the topic of plane noise and pollution, i.e. the reason we were there, but it was interesting. I also learned that the acronym ‘TNC’ stands for “Transportation Network Companies” and refers to Uber, Lyft, etc. Kudos to the committee member who asked what ‘TNC’ meant.
As usual for port presentations the material on the screen only talked about passenger numbers at SeaTac, which are at their peak and have been peaking for the last few years. Operation counts were absent from the slides. However for noise and pollution, it’s the number of planes that count, not how many people are on the plane. Verbally though Lance did say that the year 2000 was the peak of operations and port official Mike Ehl was able to rattle the exact operation count off the top of his head. However he hadn’t memorized other stats for people counts or neighboring years. It reinforced my hunch that the port really really wants to get past that year 2000 peak so that their claim at noise meetings that “SeaTac is the busiest it’s ever been.” and that’s why the noise is many times worse than it’s ever been is a little less intellectually dishonest.
As previously mentioned the committee members (with one exception) were not air traffic experts, and their comments and questions were representative of that background. There was a running theme of bullet trains and hyperlink systems rescuing them from airport impacts. Those technologies are great and may be implemented some day, but not in our lifetimes in this area. For the foreseeable future air travel is the most cost effective means of long distance transportation, unless oil prices go through the roof, but that’s a topic for another day.
From their questions and comments I did get a better understanding of the overall negative impacts from SeaTac Airport. On Vashon Island, noise and ultra-fine particles are really the only impacts, but for those who live in the immediate vicinity of the airport other conditions are really bad as well. Several members brought up increased vehicle congestion due to the airport. One member from Tukwila asked what the port was doing about baggage theft. At first I was somewhat bewildered why that would rise to a top concern for her (unless she travels a lot with luggage). However I suspect it’s that if the port doesn’t crack down on these thefts, then the airport becomes a honey pot for criminals, near where she lives. It was an interesting perspective that hadn’t occurred to me at all before.
I have several times referred to an exception among the committee members. Somehow Sheila Brush from Des Moines managed to get on the committee. She is a local activist against the propaganda, deception, and sometimes outright lies being broadcast by the FAA and an army of revolving door industry groups. Very sadly, our port – to a lesser degree – participates in this as well. She has developed a deep technical understanding of the issues over the past few years, as many of us have been forced to.
Sheila was responsible for my personal highlight of the entire evening. When the topic was on the peak operations year of 2000, Sheila asked Mike Ehl from the port how many operations of that peak year were on the third runway. It was a trap, and Mike stepped right into it. He replied, correctly, that the third runway didn’t open until 2008. Sheila came back with, paraphrasing as I didn’t write it down, “oh, so we handled that peak load with only two runways?”. By that time Mike realized what had just happened and there was awkward silence. It was a delicious moment.
She pressed the FAA folks several times to address Wake Recategorization and specifically what formal processes would be followed before it could be implemented at SeaTac. They effectively refused to answer her question. Wake Recategorization basically allows planes to fly closer together. I referred to this in a previous post about a really concerning Southflow flight path change I’m seeing more and more often where arrivals that have always been on the East side of the airport (coming from places like the East Coast) are transitioned to the West side of the airport. Wake Recategorization could allow the FAA to eliminate overflights of the Bellevue area and move them all to the West side, doubling noise on Vashon that has already increased many fold due to NextGen.
In general the FAA folks declined to engage in any technical discussions, instead rolling out platitudes and warm fuzzy slogans. However Randy was able to energetically gesticulate while espousing how excited he was to be engaging with airport communities. It was a performance reminiscent of Jim Carrey’s earlier films, and added a bit of levity to the evening.
The FAA has a tendency to quietly make flight path/procedure changes without any announcement, let alone community involvement. For technical legal reasons, challenging them becomes a steeper climb 60 days after the rule change, even if it wasn’t announced. This happened in 2016 in Burien where Northflow turbo prop departures were taking a sharp left turn immediately upon takeoff, impacting neighborhoods not previously impacted. The change, when exposed, had the usual green washing at the time as environmentally motivated to save fuel and carbon emissions for destination South of the airport. However I saw this same maneuver applied to Victoria bound flights where it increased their total flight path. The real reason was to get the slower turbo props out of the way of faster jet aircraft and thereby increase throughput. The City of Burien filed a petition to the Ninth Circuit Court protesting the change, and the FAA did suspend the automatic sharp left turn by turbo props, however there is still no definite resolution.
I don’t know if anything material will be accomplished at these meetings. The real decision makers are not there, and some port/industry people gave off a vibe that they had been served with a subpoena to show up. Stan Shepherd, the airport noise manager, did show up and hung out in the back of the room. It’s too bad he’s not actually on the committee because, depending on the technical expertise of the FAA folks, he could easily be the most useful non-citizen member.
Finally, something that struck me as sadly ironic is that it was really quiet in the conference room; I didn’t hear any planes. This is in stark contrast to my cabin on Vashon Island, where as often as every two or three minutes they drown out all the sounds of nature, destroying the reason I moved there 20 years ago.
UPDATE (15 March 2018):
Added a link to the StART web site and added the names of the two FAA representatives after I was able to confirm the correct spelling of their names.