TagBNA(1)

Nashville's suburbs are taking the FAA to court arguing against the same shortcut to changing flight paths used in so many previous community lawsuits: CATEX, challenging new departure headings and Performance-Based Navigation procedures at Nashville International Airport — an airport growing from 200,000 to an expected 300,000-plus annual operations by 2037. At the heart of the case are troubling contradictions in the FAA's own paperwork: noise modeling that claims zero impact anywhere in the study area, while a separate FAA letter quietly acknowledges noise increases of more than 5 dB in two locations. Add in a categorical exclusion that deliberately splits one airspace redesign into smaller pieces to avoid public environmental review, and a nature preserve being modeled without accounting for terrain — and a familiar pattern emerges.