The airport next door: Boeing Field invites you to open house about its future

(From kingcounty.gov)

Boeing Field – aka King County International Airport, “one of the busiest non-hub airports in the nation” – is just over the ridge from West Seattle, with much of its operations within earshot if not always within view. So you might be interested in this announcement:

King County International Airport-Boeing Field (KCIA) invites community members to attend an open house on Sept. 4 to learn about the Part 150 Study purpose and process. The Part 150 Study is a voluntary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) process that identifies the level of aircraft noise in an airport vicinity and identifies potential measures to reduce the effects of noise on surrounding neighborhoods.

The open house will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 4 at the KCIA Flight Service Station, 6526 Ellis Ave. S. in Seattle. Free parking is available in the building’s parking lot and on nearby streets. A King County Metro bus stop at Ellis Avenue South and South Warsaw Street, across from the KCIA Flight Service Station, serves the 124 and 60 lines.

Community members can stop by any time between 6 and 7:30 p.m. to meet and talk with the project team and share their feedback. No registration is necessary, and there will be no formal presentation. Language interpretation will be available in Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Khmer, Vietnamese, and Tagalog. For those unable to make this event, the study team will host additional open houses and engagement opportunities throughout the study, which will continue through 2026.

KCIA is undertaking two important studies to plan for the future of the airport: the Vision 2045 Airport Plan and the Part 150 Study. King County owns and operates KCIA, a public-use airport. Both the county and the FAA have authority over different parts of the airport’s operations, management, and future development.

“Public input is critical to the successful outcome of Vision 2045 and the Part 150 Study,” said John Parrott, KCIA airport director. “We invite the community to join us Sept. 4 to learn more about the Part 150 Study and talk to us about airport noise. Both technical information and community input will inform the process as we move through this study and identify measures to reduce noise.”

The Part 150 Study will be completed according to FAA guidance and will inform aspects of the Vision 2045 Airport Plan. The Part 150 Study will include the following:

-Study existing and future flight corridors.
-Develop aircraft noise exposure maps for current and future flight conditions.
-Evaluate air traffic control procedures that could reduce noise exposure over residential areas.
-Consider land use controls that the cities of Seattle and Tukwila, and King County, could introduce to reduce future incompatible land uses (such as residences, schools, and churches) from being developed within high noise exposure areas.
-Evaluate ways to reduce noise impacts within high noise exposure areas.

To learn more or provide input online, visit the project website at KCIAPlanning.com.

Bbron August 27, 2024 (12:40 pm)

i’m not sure how BFI could significantly reduce its noise without adjusting SEA’s class B higher. the best way (only way?) to reduce noise over areas is have planes flying higher, and any pilot flying out of BFI would appreciate the extra altitude, but that’d be asking a lot of SEA/commercial pilots/regulators to do any meaningful adjustment to the class B.

Christopher B August 27, 2024 (2:09 pm)

I’d fully expect that a timeline to 2045 would encompass an inevitable transition to electric aircraft, which would benefit surrounding residents not only with significantly quieter propulsion, but also in cutting back on the regular effluent of lead from the use of Avgas.
- Bbron August 27, 2024 (4:50 pm)
  
  Avgas shouldn’t be a problem anymore; it’s really the feet dragging by owner/operators and the FAA to get type certs. for using mogas, or finally getting non-lead avgas approved and push on FBOs to get the distribution in place. tho don’t get me wrong, i think it’s a tragedy avgas has been around as long as it has, and needs to be immediately discontinued. i doubt that we will see viable electric airplanes at all except for very short flights; the weight to power isn’t there and might never safely be able to happen (i.e. energy density requirement and how that works out in emergencies). when it comes to transportation, it feels like folks are content with the norm because they think a pivotal technology is just around the corner when it very possible that their practicality will never come to fruition, e.g. autonomous vehicles coming to public roadways.
  - Christopher B. August 27, 2024 (8:24 pm)
    
    If we’re talking about a timeline that stretches out to 2045, one would really lack vision to not comprehend that electric aircraft will be a thing. Regurgitating that they won’t work based on the limits of today’s technology ignores the inevitable advances in battery and materials science and seems myopic to say the least.
    - Bbron August 27, 2024 (11:32 pm)
      
      sure, 2045 seems far away being 21 years away, but i think you underestimate how much more energy density batteries need to achieve before you can start replacing planes that fly out of BFI, and underestimate how slow moving the aviation industry is (for good reason: safety). the carriers investing in startups now only expect outcomes in the measure of decades, and they don’t believe they’d be replacing current flights, rather creating a new market around short metropolitan flights. it’s disingenuous to look at what i wrote and believe it was “regurgitated” or “myopic”; it’s okay to practice realism and there are plenty of smarter people than I that share that practicality. you haven’t offered any counter as to why electric airplanes will be a thing other than “things will get better” which is definitely something i’ve seen said often and without substance to back it up could be called… short-sighted.
SE Dick August 27, 2024 (5:11 pm)

Sounds like you have ‘a little knowledge’, Bbron, and that’s a dangerous thing. The abv is not concerned with “how BFI could…reduce its noise”, but with how to “reduce the effects” of both ‘existing and future flight corridors and conditions’ on (select) surrounding neighborhoods. In a prior Part 150 process the recently vibrantly gentrified Madrona neighborhood had organized and decided that the best way to reduce SeaTac noise over their newly-valued properties would be to what they called “share” their burden–half the flights that turned east at elevation over them–with the then still less-hotly-valued and so less-fiercely-defended homes to their south, as in Columbia City–at half the elevation. So where there’d always been flights–but were now wealthy and effective ppl–the effects of increasing SeaTac noise would be reduced by sharing it for the first time ever–again half the east-turn flights at half the elevation–with what was still the relatively vulnerable Rainier Valley. The details have dimmed with time, but that would have been as I recall a violation of federal law as outlined by Part 150 itself, and it took many months of letters, public hearings, meetings and so on to beat it back. The Feds, in service of commerce and the wealth that barked the loudest, came within a hair’s-breadth of violating their own guidelines to hand more to those with much at awful cost to those with less–and limitless expansion to the airports in our midst. So if you’re at any risk of your life’s quality being smashed to bits by new noise, Bbron, you might read more suspiciously. That there’s a hungry wolf, hosting that open house.
- Bbron August 27, 2024 (10:56 pm)
  
  fair point on the distinction between what I assumed they wanted to do (reduce noise) and what they actually said about impacts

Kt August 27, 2024 (1:44 pm)

I wish they would open a restaurant there again. Was fun having lunch at the Blue Max watching the planes come and go, not to mention dancing the night away in the bar in the mid 80s!

Question Authority August 27, 2024 (2:12 pm)

That Airport got greedy and has been slowly condemning all the area’s used for small private propeller planes and allowed rich corporations to park jets instead.

Sorry, comment time is over.