Nashville suburbs sue FAA over new departure headings

September 18, 2026

A familiar type of lawsuit with a twist

On September 4, 2026, the City of Oak Hill, Tennessee, two community groups (Course Correct Nashville and the Crieve Hall Neighborhood Association), and one resident filed a petition for review against the FAA in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. They are challenging new departure headings and Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) procedures at Nashville International Airport (BNA). If that sounds familiar, it should. This is the same fight Burien fought over the 250 Turn, and that Phoenix fought over Sky Harbor. The question is which of those two stories Nashville is about to repeat.

Though smaller than Sea-Tac, BNA is growing at an equally impressive rate, with increases expected from 200,000 annual operations in 2017 to over 300,000 by 2037. They registered a 14% jump in traffic just one year from 2022 to 2023, with Southwest building it into a major hub. To manage that growth, in November 2025 the FAA made two changes. It implemented new departure headings off all six parallel runways and amended 22 arrival and 9 departure procedures. In July 2026, it amended those procedures again.

Community Engagement — Nashville | Federal Aviation Administration

None of these actions received an Environmental Assessment. All were approved through Categorical Exclusions (CATEXes)—the paperwork shortcut that lets the FAA skip public review by declaring, in advance, that there will be no significant impact.

For BNA, the FAA conducted its standard (AEDT) noise modeling and concluded there would be no reportable or significant noise increases anywhere in the study area. Their report states that the baseline and proposed scenarios returned the same values. Not one grid point changed.

The FAA held one virtual workshop, on March 6, 2025, where staff told residents the changes would be minimally impactful because flight activity would be dispersed rather than concentrated over any one area. It posted the recording on its community engagement page:

The petitioners are communities in south Nashville near Radnor Lake State Park, a state-designated Class II Natural Area. Their petition makes three core claims: the FAA failed to adequately assess impacts on the affected communities and on Radnor Lake; the FAA's own workshop statements about dispersal and minimal impact don't match what residents are experiencing; and the July 2026 order restarts the 60-day clock for judicial review under 49 U.S.C. § 46110, making the challenge timely even though the original headings date to November 2025.

The timeliness argument is the first fight. Expect the FAA to argue the July amendment does not reopen the November order.

The exhibits attached to the petition contain some things worth noting. The noise screening says the two scenarios produced identical results—yet the FAA's own letter to the Tennessee historic preservation office admits the model found two areas that could see noise increases of more than 5 dB, rising from the 38–42 DNL range to as high as 47 DNL. Both statements come from the same agency, about the same project, weeks apart. The screening also states flatly that it does not consider terrain—in hilly south Nashville, near a nature preserve.

The March 2025 CATEX said that the upcoming PBN procedures "will be reviewed independently" because they have "independent utility." That is the FAA splitting one airspace redesign into separate reviews, each small enough to fit under a CATEX. Readers who followed the SAMP process will recognize the technique.

We have seen this movie. In 2019, Burien won its case against the FAA over the 250 Turn—the Ninth Circuit remanded the CATEX for failing to consider cumulative impacts, including SAMP growth.

The FAA responded in January 2020 with a "Limited Update" that added a table of nearby projects, argued none of them added runway capacity, noted that turboprops were declining anyway, and concluded nothing changed. The turn stayed. Burien "won" and got nothing, because the court's remand was narrow and the FAA complied with the paperwork, not the problem. The city couldn't justify spending more money to appeal a technically-compliant piece of paper.

In another, somewhat similar case, City of Phoenix v. Huerta (2017), the D.C. Circuit actually vacated new departure routes over Sky Harbor. But that very expensive win was limited to only the specific neighborhoods that sued. Step Two—reviewing the rest of the Phoenix area—committed the FAA to nothing beyond reading the comments, at its "sole discretion." This year, both Arizona senators are protesting a new FAA Phoenix airspace project they say ignores the 2017 ruling and puts 86,000 more people under new noise.

So, the real spectrum isn't win-or-lose. It's Burien (won, got nothing), Phoenix (won, got a few years of very narrow, expensive relief before the FAA circled back.)

But the Oak Hill petition is still worth watching. Its strongest card isn't the noise modeling—courts almost never second-guess AEDT results. It's that workshop. The FAA told Nashville residents, on camera, that the changes would disperse traffic and be minimally impactful. If the record shows the opposite, this case looks more like Phoenix than Burien. If the court instead hands down a narrow procedural remand, expect the FAA to run the Burien playbook: add a section, change nothing, wait out the plaintiffs' legal budget.

The CATEX process is designed to produce "no significant impact," and without change in attitudes--at every level of government--even the strongest court victory tends to buy time, not permanent relief.

In this case, residents have the FAA's words contradicting what is actually happening. We're about to find out what the Sixth Court of Appeals is willing to do about that.