The Airport Communities Podcast
In our last episode (A-Weighted), we talked about just one of the ways noise is misrepresented to the public. Even the way it is measured misleads decision makers (and the public) as to how bad it is–using a system that depicts flights only a few hundred feet from the runway with the same numbers as routine yard work tasks.
This time we talk about a related topic, something that will sting: the main reason we all keep losing.
Airport communities have never really agreed on what winning means–unless it can be defined as “making the airplanes go somewhere else.”
Why have improper noise measurements gone unchanged in 50 years? The same reason air quality monitoring has languished. A lack of interest in anything beyond some current crisis.
Even kids playing sports beyond an introductory level are taught that winning matters. Participation is great, but team success is even better–even if it takes time to get there. People don’t play team sports very long without that drive for shared success. That includes coaching and a willingness to change both strategies and tactics to get there over time.
Serious (winning) issue advocacies also do that.
Another airport myth, as powerful as ‘second airport’, is the lie that community engagement is the key to success. That theory has been tested over and over–including during the Third Runway–at the cost of millions of dollars. Apart from the regular stream of weak legal challenges to the flight paths themselves, the net result of misplaced faith in ‘community engagement’ as some secret sauce has only made people cynical about making any useful progress.
Why do these myths persist? Very few people ever become truly engaged in any airport advocacy. And very few airport community advocacies persist more than a few years. Information is extremely low, and the few people who are engaged are often so willing to believe in ‘something’ they often pursue almost anything that sounds like short-term relief.
The other, just as awkward discussion is that people are encouraged to confuse participation with effective strategy. In this game? Everyone’s a winner simply by virtue of showing up.
With those perverse incentives, people can spend any amount of time re-inventing the wheel: re-learning things that don’t need to be re-learned, attempting to build community support that never happens–and is, in fact, unnecessary. And be rewarded for it.
As so many politicians will tell you, “People just want to feel heard.” Is that how you really feel? If so, that is exactly what you will get–better listening sessions–maybe with big shot electeds who are happy to have their picture taken with you. It assumes that if you could only get an audience with the King, he/she will (finally) listen to something they did not previously understand and grant your petition. Do you really believe any piece of that?
Over time, environmental issues that have been addressed productively by a small group of people–usually working slowly and methodically to establish a technocratic process which puts the onus on ongoing management expertise and takes the pressure off community members to develop the real solutions.
But when people are encouraged to define empathy and trying as the measures of success, real success on such technical issues will always remain out of reach.
When people are encouraged to do the wrong things over and over. When the wrong things happen over and over, one can either assume the problem is unsolvable, or that people are not taking the issue seriously enough to go beyond a participation medal.
Our home page states that the SAMP will lead to at least a third more operations. We became confident of that the moment we started looking at data from 1996. It’s obvious if one takes the Airport Director’s Dad Joke seriously.
“An airport is an ongoing construction project where passengers and airplanes are constantly getting in the way.”
Our airport communities have never taken that seriously. Instead, everyone treats airports like one-off construction projects and never look at that one word: ongoing. They never really end.
The SAMP began in 2012, four years after the Third Runway opened. Imagine building a freeway and then four years later telling residents that yet another freeway needed to be built in the same spot.
If an issue requires ongoing management, but only ever gets looked at one project at a time, something is deeply wrong, not just with the game, but with the fact that people keep playing it using the same losing strategies and tactics.
Part of that is the Casino–both for electeds and for you. If you think you are qualified to come in and apply the same strategies and tactics that so many other groups have employed you must believe that you are very, very special indeed. Because they did not have you, ‘this time will be different.’
The Casino encourages people to play and lose. But there’s nothing stopping anyone from adopting a better approach. Even kids playing sports know that. They want to win more than just participate.
To learn how you can make a difference, read our STNI: 2026 Legislative Agenda and
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