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 of the entire series has been a reluctance of the FAA & Port to engage in the very technical subject of air traffic control with any level of technical depth. Even when very specific technical questions have been asked, they are often simply ignored by the FAA representatives who are in a position to provide answers, but choose not to. One is left with the clear impression that the FAA & Port’s goal with these meetings is to help people come to accept their miserable lot in life under increasingly oppressive flight paths while the goal of most of the community members is to try and do something to improve the situation in a real and material way.
The fourth meeting was held on the evening of August 21st 2018 at the SeaTac Conference Center and, after slogging through the pointless Kumbaya group hug stuff, this one actually presented real and useful information. This was due primarily to a presentation by Steve Vale, SEA ATCT Air Traffic Manager. I may be biased as he focused on the mechanics of flow change decisions, which is a pet interest of mine, but may not have interested others as much as I. I’ll go into the details when I come to that part of the meeting.
The meeting was called to order at 6:07:59pm.
The first segment was led by Lance Lyttle, Sea-Tac Director. After the requisite introductions around the table, he proceeded to frame the intent of StART in terms which simply didn’t ring true considering what had actually transpired in the first three StART meetings. While Lance spoke of practical solutions and concrete actions, nothing of the sort have been broached so far in the meeting series. He seemed to use a lot of verbiage without actually saying much.
Lance then handed off to the “Facilitator” Phyllis Shulman. How to put this. While Lance often has a tinge a disingenuousness that is in fact very common among government employees and so not particularly surprising, Phyllis takes this to a patronizing level. After evoking a series of saccharine motifs like “supporting each others dignity” and “trying to accomplish a new reset of the relationship”, she went on to have all the members around the table answer the question “What would help you feel that you and your comments are valued in this process?”. We learned that Phyllis doesn’t want to be (unnecessarily) interrupted, which is an odd perspective considering that she moderates the meetings and doles out the morsels of time for the other members to speak. Most, though not all, the FAA/Port people generally gave answers focused around their feelings, while the community members salvaged this question by turning it into several permutations of “I’ll feel valued if we accomplish real flight operational changes X, Y, and Z.”, which didn’t seem to sit well with our facilitator. The question, and this whole segment, was intended to be about feelings. I don’t get it, but maybe that’s just my world view as a software engineer with a physics degree. The whole thing had the air of a counselor at a summer camps trying to force a couple boys who got into a fight to apologize to each other. Phyllis seems perfectly nice and her services would be very valuable in couples counseling, but this just seems to be the wrong gig for her.
That was the first 17 minutes.
What happened next was a bit of unscripted drama. Brian Wilson from Burien requested an alternate be able to sit in for a member, John Parnass, who had a conflicting commitment (note that the StART meeting date was changed less than a month before the meeting, though I don’t know if this was the cause of his conflict). As I understood what he said, the sit-in was approved by Burien representatives and the StART charter quoted by Brian seemed to allow exactly this kind of arrangement. Sheila Brush gave an impassioned argument in support stressing the overarching goals of StART and the assault on trust that denying this request would facilitate. However, Yarden Weidenfeld (Special Council to Mayor of Federal Way) chimed in that, while he would support this in general and going forward, he had in fact made the exact same request a month before the meeting and been told “No”. So, he argued it would be unfair to allow it for Burien, but not for Federal Way. This created a genuine conflict between parities usually aligned in both goals and tactics and, it looked to me, like the Port folks were gloating in their accomplishment. That might sound harsh, but I’m just reporting how things looked to me. It’s entirely possible that what I was seeing was an unconscious sense of relief that for once critical statements were being directed at someone other than them. I can see both sides of the actual argument about sit-ins, but the frustrated energy should not have been amongst the community members, but rather directed at the Port who created this conflict by not consistently following the charter. The end result was to do nothing.
Following this, the official agenda was rejoined for a discussion of the Aviation Noise Working Group that had met without the public being invited, which effectively means it was held in secret. I would have liked to attend, even just to sit and quietly listen, but as merely a member of the public, I was prohibited from attending. For the summary of the working group activities, the invited noise expert, Vincent Mestre, just phoned it in. Literally. His resume and his spoken fluency with the topic did suggest a real expertise, but over the phone so much is lost his contribution was unfortunately not very significant. I admit that my strong preference for presenters in person vs. on the phone may be personal and others might not care as much. The topics from the working group that were summarized in the StART meeting rehashed well worn themes with no new (to me) information presented. There may have been new information presented in the working group itself, but I’ll never know, as it was held in secret. The selection of a consultant from Landrum & Brown was also questioned as a conflict of interest due to their previous work on the third runway project, which made very different representations/promises of how it would be used vs. how it is actually being used – to the detriment of the surrounding communities. L&B was also selected to perform the environmental review of the on-going SAMP, which has as a stated goal substantially increasing cargo traffic, especially in the middle of the night, when extra capacity exists because demand for commercial air traffic is low during these handful of hours when people are usually sleeping, except for those living under these newly proposed cargo flights it would appear.
Next up was a presentation by Steve Vale, SEA ATCT Air Traffic Manager. This was by far the single most informative presentation of the entire StART series of meetings. It started with a low content density video which could have been skipped, but with that out of the way he went straight into a detailed discussion of the Northflow challenges that lead ATCT to favor Southflow. The two principal ones are conflicts with BFI arrivals where the onus is on KSEA to guarantee separations, and the staggered Southern ends of the three runways which means that in Northflow they are not allowed to have the simultaneous departures and arrivals that the 3rd runway allows in Southflow. Two other smaller constraints concern access to one of the taxiways and, I recall, the placement of some ILS beacons or other equipment (not positive on this one). The latter two items could probably be rectified, it seems to me, through some relatively minor rejiggering. The staggered runways and BFI are more permanent challenges. However note that all of these constraints only impact throughput. If the operation count was lower they would not be a problem. It’s always safer to take off and land into the wind, so when KSEA is operating with tail winds, a compromise of safety vs. throughput is being made. That’s the plain and simple truth. I don’t pretend to quantify the additional risk, other than saying it’s non-zero. I think the “capacity” of SeaTac should not be defined by the number of operations possible in Southflow assuming you ignore Northern winds, but rather needs to be defined by the capacity in whatever flow the wind dictates, i.e. it should never be permissible to compromise safety for throughput.
Steve said in calm winds Southflow is preferred. However Southflow is even sometimes used with strong Northerly winds and excellent visibility. For example, last Saturday night (Sep. 1, 2018) the winds changed, as forecast, decisively Northerly around 5pm PDT (see screen capture at the end of this post), yet the airport stayed in Southflow all evening and night, even during periods with Northerly winds as high as 13 mph NNE. It would be extremely useful if the Tower would publish, via a web site or twitter or something, when they intend to operate SeaTac with tail winds and for how long, and at what speed of tail winds they would relent and switch flow. Many people plan their whole lives around the flow at SeaTac, and when the wind direction stops becoming a useful predictor of the flow it becomes impossible to do so and is insanely frustrating. I speak from regular experience. If anybody from the FAA is reading this, please publish in real time flow forecasts as the wind direction is not a sufficiently useful predictor.
Beyond the discussion of airport flow, Steve also fielded questions from the members. Sheila Brush asked a comprehensive question on the risk of the automatic 250 degree turn for Turboprop departures in Northflow as it conflicts with the path held in reserve for go-arounds (also known as missed approaches). Sheila specifically touched on the fact that the Turboprop departure and the soon to be aborted arrival will be communicating with different groups at ATC on the radio, and it wasn’t clear this risk was considered. Steve stressed that for every arrival the go-around zone will be clear, i.e. that they understand this and account for it. Sheila said it didn’t look this way visually from the ground. Steve seemed very confident, but a careful analysis of the radar data would be required to determine if this was always the case.
There was a bit of news released by Steve. Wake RECAT is scheduled to be implemented at SeaTac on October 16th, 2018. Wake RECAT basically allows planes to fly closer together, enabling an airport to squeeze in more operations per minute. My previous blog post on the first StART meeting has more details. Steve tried to assure us that it will barely make a difference in SeaTac due to our aircraft profile. That begs the question though, if it barely makes a difference, why go through the effort of implementing it? The members and audience were rightly skeptical in light of the assurances made about the third runway. Of note is that there was evidently not an EA or EIS associated with this change, or even as far as I know an official CatEx (categorical exclusion) or any public outreach at all. If anybody reading this know about a CatEx, please let me know.
On issues of policy Steve effectively took the fifth, which was frustrating. He many times simply said he is implementing “decisions of record” that are mostly made in DC, i.e. just following orders. However I find it hard to believe that someone with the day to day practical experience he has (he said he spends most of his days with headphones on) would be a mere tool to implement policy handed down from on high. My suspicion is that he would have substantially more influence on guiding policy that he’s letting on. To that end, it’s doubly useful he presented at StART. First to present information by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, and second to witness, especially through the public comment, the real pain, suffering, and permanent physical and psychological damage that this facility is inflicting in the community. I had the opportunity to briefly speak with him after the meeting, and he came across as unusually genuine and human for someone in the higher levels of the FAA.
The public comment period brought with it another drama. The facilitator spent about a minute laying out the logistics of the public comment period, fair enough, but then spent another minute telling people, effectively, to please be nice. This was couched in the sort of gooey “feelings” language that I had hoped would limited to the meeting introduction. As it turns out this minute of entreaties bordering on satire was consequential as, what do you know, there wasn’t enough time for all 13 people who had signed up to speak to actually speak. There was time for 10 people at one minute each. This created another uproar, but unlike the first drama over sit-ins, there was no lack of moral clarity here on right vs. wrong. It was basically the facilitator vs. everybody else. Nobody from the Port even stepped in to back up her position, and it collapsed as all 13 people were allowed to speak for their one minute each. One of those ultimately allowed to speak at the end was a young boy (my guess maybe 14 years old) who described that the overflights have made it impossible to create the YouTube videos he had in the past due to there not being even a five minute period of peace throughout the day. The perspective of young people is one rarely heard in these kinds of meetings, and this StART meeting was on the verge of silencing it.
David
PS: Below is the METAR, i.e. weather data for KSEA for the period Saturday evening/night when it was in Southflow with strong tailwinds and excellent visibility.
