Last Updated: October 18th, 2022

Ten Practical Things The FAA Can Do For Airport Communities Right Now

Introduction

Per your request, here are some specific things the Federal government could do to help airport communities. This list has two features:

  1. It is not comprehensive but it is practical, I just started jotting down the things I know that could help residents now, just to get Commercial Aviation on par with the other regulated industries I am familiar with, while avoiding things that are already on activists’ radar (eg. leaded avgas) .
  2. I intentionally avoided ‘community’. Frankly, the Quiet Skies Caucus focuses waaaay too much attention on that. I understand why and I sympathise. But it would be helpful to recognise that an airport community has a lot in common with other communities that face ongoing risk management, eg. a coastal community. Local electeds need practical tools to manage the constant challenges. But they also need cues from the Federal government to take that management seriously. Any Mayor of a coastal community receives both: tools and cues which tell them to take an active role to manage and mitigate both acute and ongoing risks. Politically, we do none of that in airport communities and that is the reason local electeds do such a poor job of representing their residents. Focusing on ‘community’ does nothing to correct this and actually makes things worse, since electeds are well-inclined to simply hand off ‘airport issues’ to local activists and call it good.

A few things…

  1. We need a five year stable funding source that is dedicated to legit aviation impacts and available only to Cities or an ILA of Cities. And ideally it should be FAA until such time as EPA has control over anything. (Keep working on efforts to get EPA funding and eventual regulatory control) but establishing the -principle- of FAA community grants is in the specific political interest of the City Of Des Moines.
  2. We need noise monitoring standards–akin to what the FCC does with cell and broadband. As fraught as the Port’s Noise Monitor System is? It’s actually pretty much best in class. But there needs to be a set of standards that say  a measurement (not a model) taken at SEA is apples to apples with a measurement at DFW. Again, the FCC now does this with cell and broadband–you can see how well each area is covered and use that to lobby for equity. This is not ‘hardware’… it’s just a measuring standard.
  3. We need to establish a standardised air quality reporting system. Again: boring measurements. We need an annual reporting system for all major airports. Every power plant generates similar environmental impact reports–again so you can do apples to apples comparisons. Has to be every year and you have to know that the report generated by the guy in the little car driving round Sea-Tac is uses -exactly- the same protocol as the guy driving round Detroit Metro. The obvious mechanism should be PSCAA. They should not require a State directive to do reporting. And it shouldn’t be an annual question: “Which agency do I beg to do a study? Will their work be considered legit?”
  4. Noise Boundary ‘grandfathering’. If you were eligible for mitigation in 2001, you should be eligible now. And if you can get to standardised noise monitoring the whole ‘modeling’ approach should disappear as well. That’s the point of noise monitoring.
  5. The Federal government should incentivise airports, contractors and lenders to make sound insulation cheaper and faster: 1choose off the shelf products, get contractors certified in sound reduction and speed lender approval. A central failure of the Port’s program was to insist on these cockamamie ‘custom contractors’, when equivalent off-the-shelf products, installable by any competent guy were available. Even worse–and no one talks about it–is the fact that lenders take forever to sign off. That alone can add years to any sound insulation. The Port tests, approves and then…. crickets for 12 months. You can never scale up sound insulation programs without these improvements.
  6. We should include testing for mold and interior air quality testing in FHA backed home loans, or any loan that backs a school inside the DNL65. This is another dirty little secret of sound insulation systems. If they’re done poorly, they create bad air which the owner does not find out about until they try to sell. And to add insult to injury, they then have to pay for the mitigation–for the next owner.
  7. Air filtration should be a requirement for all Federally backed building loans  within the noise boundary map. And we should have some sort of tax credit or grant system to include that in mortgages, grants or bonding backed by the US.
  8. The FAA should add an equity component to AIP grant scoring.. A practical example: twenty years ago the Port did hundreds of Port Packages for single family homes in Des Moines in a particular, overwhelmingly white neighbourhood. But they skipped the largely BIPOC, big apartment complexes immediately adjacent. Last week the Commission just crowed about finally getting round to that. An equity bump would incentivise the grant pool towards sound insulation in general. Since more and more BIPOC people now live under the flight paths, the pool should gently be nudged towards spending that addresses 2health.
  9. Require FAA to meet with local electeds. The FAA Northwest Region is right in the middle of Des Moines. And it is a total fortress. The Director and Community Representative insist that all communication go through a ’roundtable’. Just require these civil servants to take an elected’s call once in a while–no screaming, just talk like human beings.
  10. And finally… for the love of Christ, please take our remote attendance proposal seriously. THAT is literally the best thing you could do for ALL airport communities. Conservation of air travel must become an acceptable part of the discussion–as it is with automobiles.

1The joke is that the Port actually experimented with Milgard on their earliest systems–which have a lifetime warranty! If the Port had simply stuck with that, we’d have almost zero problems now, not just because of the warranty, but because it would have allowed any legit contractor to do the work instead of these fly-by-night ‘specialists’.

2I’m not so interested in getting ‘community’ into the FAA vocabulary as much as ‘equity’. If you can make ‘equity’ a component of their granting language, I think that is far more compelling towards the goal of prying away Section 190 grant apps  away from ‘owner’ towards ‘City of Des Moines’. I want to be able to say to the FAA Administrator, “I want a grant for Des Moines based on equity for the people of -Des Moines-, which is a separate thing from “the airspace concerning Sea-Tac Airport”.