TagL3 Harris(3)

Vashon Island Fair Skies, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, wrote to the SeaTac City Council in July 2020 requesting help pressuring the Port of Seattle to retain raw second-by-second data from its 24 airport noise monitors, which vendor L3Harris currently purges after processing. The letter argues this raw data is essential for accurate noise analysis, demonstrating with December 2019 monitor data that high background noise at some sites causes the processing software to miss many actual aircraft overflight events. The group asks the city to urge the Port to make a simple procedural change — either downloading the data itself or requiring L3Harris to deliver it — noting the storage requirement is a modest ~62 MB per monitor per month.

The Port of Seattle issued Purchase Order A-0000274251 to Exelis Inc. of Herndon, VA, for a Noise Monitoring and Flight Tracking System at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, originally dated January 21, 2015. Two change orders were subsequently issued: Change Order 1 reduced the contract price by $18,400 (replacing four weather stations with METARS data), and Change Order 2 increased it by $32,802 for additional site modifications, bringing the final total PO amount to $1,001,655.16.