The Airport Communities Podcast
On May 22, 2026 the Sustainable Airport Master Plan DEIS was released and a sixty day public comment period began.
Our last 3 minute explainer on how you can help your community by being patient and providing high quality comments. It is not click bait to say: It’s easier than you think. It’s not what you think.
In Ep #30, we said that ‘NTP’ means ‘near-term projects’. The Port of Seattle has been telling us, since 2012, that the largest expansion in Sea-Tac history was coming in several phases. This has been no secret except that they have not exactly advertised that the strategy, called segmentation, is used to divide projects up in order to avoid permitting challenges — like the Third Runway. Maybe we could not hear that message clearly over the non-stop construction.
This is our last “don’t do that” episode for a while. The next several will be “dos”.
Both are real doozies. The last “don’t” is: Don’t talk about flight paths in your SEPA comment. That will be hard because almost every cell in your body just wants the airplanes to go somewhere else. However, whether you live in Burien or Vashon or Mercer Island or Enumclaw or anywhere within our TRACON? Don’t do that.
The “dos”, coming in the next batch of episodes, will also be challenging for the same reasons. We know where everyone wants to go. That’s why it’s so hard to take a route that seems less ‘direct’.
But we’ve spent the last 30 episodes making a very simple case: What everyone has tried is designed not to work. As with the construction, that is no secret. We have no ‘magic’. But if everyone has been trying the same losing strategy decade after decade, it’s time to try something different.
Topics
- 2025 – FAA SAMP NEPA Final ROD/FONSI
- 2025 – Port of Seattle press release on SAMP-NTP/SAMP-SEPA DEIS
- 2026 – SAMP/SEPA Draft EIS
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