TagVashon Island Fair Skies(25)

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.

A color-coded map showing complaint data by ZIP code in the SeaTac area for August 2019. The map displays different complaint volume ranges from 1-51 complaints (green) to over 13,000 complaints (red), with ZIP code 98070 showing the highest complaint levels in red.

This November 2017 presentation by David Goebel examines how the FAA's NextGen modernization program—specifically the new 'HAWKZ' RNAV flight procedure—has increased aircraft noise over Vashon Island, located west of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. It explains why so many arriving flights are routed over the island despite SeaTac's runways running north-south, compares the old radar-based approach with the new GPS-guided one, and discusses the real-world altitude impacts residents have experienced. The presentation also covers community response options and what other affected neighborhoods have done to push back against similar NextGen-related noise increases.

A petition to the Port of Seattle Commission requesting the addition of two noise monitors on Vashon Island to monitor aircraft noise from new FAA NextGen flight procedures. The petition cites concerns about focused flight paths over Vashon Island at low altitudes affecting approximately 250 arrivals per day in Southflow operations.