This page is for community members who wish to make a complaint about a single event. That is, an individual flight going over your neighborhood for any reason.
- However, it is not the place for passenger complaints or anything to do with your experience in or at the airport. (For those, call the Port of Seattle or the individual airlines.)
- And it is definitely not the place for any kind of general beef you have about ‘the airport’, ‘aviation’, ‘noise’, ‘pollution’, etc. That is what the other 712,804 documents on this site is for. 🙂
How to complain about the noise from a particular flight
If a plane flies over your house and it’s super loud, please note as much information as you can, specifically the precise time it occurred and your location.
- Call or write the Port of Seattle Noise Office .they own and operate Sea-Tac Airport: (206) 787-6793. The first time you contact them, you’ll need to register with your name and phone number for the database. After that, it’s a fairly quick process.
- Airnoise.io is a popular phone ‘app’ and website which makes it extremely easy to register noise complaints.
- If you’re really serious, you can also try writing or calling the FAA Northwest Mountain Region Acting Noise Ombudsman. Vikas Uberoi at 9-anm-noise@faa.gov or (206) 231-4202.
Pro Tip: The Port of Seattle is required to diligently track all noise complaints. However, they have no enforcement capability. As a general rule, they log and report them to the FAA. So to the extent that they currently ‘do’ anything about individual flights depends on how much community concern there seems to be. They ask for your name and phone number because they (and all airports) track the number of unique complainers. As an example, let’s say there are 20,000 complaints from your neighborhood in a given month–and they all happen to be you. 😀 That may actually work against your concerns. The more unique complainers they see about a particular event (or events) the more attention those complaints receive.
How to complain about other problems with a particular flight
If you have concerns about anything else to do with a particular aircraft zipping over your head, including but not limited to, the altitude of the aircraft, some erratic motion, objects seeming to be emitted from the aircraft (eg. fuel), etc.
The best thing to do is to call or email the Flight Standards District Office (FSDO) – Washington (faa.gov) (206) 231-3828.
Yes, the FAA does have a hotline. However, for most community complaints, if you fill out the form, at a certain point it simply directs you to contact the FSDO.
Their inspectors monitor and investigate the safety of each flight. They are conveniently located at 2200 216th St. in Des Moines, WA. You’ll need to make an appointment to visit and speak with an inspector.
The FAA gets complaints all the time. In the first place, many of these issues are normal. Just a few examples: an occasional go-around is not a safety issue. Wheels down, even three miles from the runway is not a reason for concern–it is actually a required safety practice. Others, such as ‘smells’, ‘fuel dumping’, ‘oil droplets on my patio’, or “I saw something fly out of the aircraft and six months later my tree died” are something else entirely.
The latter are serious charges. But they are difficult to prove, and despite all the press, the FAA and the airlines in general, have a stellar flight safety record. The FAA is woefully under-staffed and frankly, many of the complaints they receive are from people working out some general unhappiness with ‘aviation’. So, expect professionalism and perhaps some skepticism.
That said, if you are convinced there was a problem with the proper operation of a flight, it is your duty to complain. The authorities don’t know what they don’t know and if you don’t complain, the consequences could be even more dire the next time the plane takes off. So again, get as much data as you can in the moment. Witnesses. Video. Real evidence. If there is something tangible for them to work with, eventually, they will take your complaint seriously, but that’s the bar.