Explore every episode of the podcast The Airport Communities Podcast

In our last episode (This Airport Discount), we talked about how lower property values are the uncomfortable 'bargain' we all get by living under the flight path.

This time, we use the end of year as an excuse to take a break, give people some word on what we're doing in 2026, shamelessly ask for support to cover our costs. And also respond a variety of questions--and save Paula from re-typing the same answers over and over!

Topics

• Section 8810
  •  SeaTac Blog article
• The Airport Discount
• A-Weighted
  • ChatGPT
  • Noise monitor service gaps
• StART
  • Quiet Communities
  • NyCar Roundtable
  • Flight Analyst case study DCA
• Flight tracks on the west side
• Flight tracks on the east side--and the zipper merge

To learn how you can make a difference, read our STNI: 2026 Legislative Agenda and: STNI.info/subscribe

In our last episode (This Will Never End), we talked about a stat most people miss: 1.6%. Although passengers have more than doubled, over the past 25 years, flights have only increased 1.6%. The airport obsesses over passengers because passengers are money. They talk far less about operations because that is the noise and pollution.

This time, we talk about another cognitive disconnect: property values vs. affordability, aka 'the airport discount'.

Over the years, many people concerned about airport impacts have complained that their property values have been reduced by the airport. That's not a bug, it's a feature. The invisible hand of the free market has indeed priced your home lower than it would otherwise be if it were somewhere far away from the airport.

Unlike much of the world, Americans use the homes not only as places to live, but also as their primary store of wealth. So anything that seems to hurt our property values feels like a direct attack on us.

But as the King County Tax Assessor told us: So what? Doesn't that mean more affordable homes? Doesn't it mean lower taxes for homeowners?

Using 'lower property values' have been seen as proxies for trying to stop airport expansion--or getting a check so individuals can go somewhere else. Most of these efforts have been either unsuccessful or unsatisfying.

But by analyzing property data we have been able to begin researching something important: how to quantify what 'the airport discount' means not for individuals, but for cities.

The Sea-Tac Communities Plan (1973-1976) was the only time in our airport's history where the impact on communities was really taken seriously. In all other cases, the focus has been on individuals. The entire Part 150 program concerns individual parcels; not cities. The Port constantly talks about benefits for jobs. What hasn't happened since 1976 has been a frank acknowledgement of what the airport is doing to local governments.

Since day one, the City of SeaTac began negotiating ongoing compensation. But other cities became convinced that  (somehow) the airport would create economic development--organically. That does not happen. In fact, the airport discount drains the life blood of the communities nearest the airport. The benefits are really, but almost in inverse proportion to distance from the flight path.

The biggest challenge in obtaining a fair reckoning has been the cities (and residents) themselves. Neither group has understood why it's just as important to compensate their city as themselves to improve everyone's quality of life.

We also want to acknowledge the passing of a true heroine for airport communities: noise researcher and advocate Arline Bronzaft.

In our last episode (The Airport Director's Dad Joke), we talked about the truth that all airports are really ongoing construction projects. They are built, from the ground up, by the express will of congress, to grow.

This time, we focus on a stat most people miss: 1.6%. Although passengers have more than doubled over the past 25 years, flights have only increased 1.6%. The airport obsesses over passengers because passengers are money. They talk far less about operations because that is the noise and pollution.

The SAMP, on the other hand, will increase the number of operations by 21%; ten times the increase of adding the Third Runway.

Perhaps the reason no one notices is that the Port's charts tend to only go back to when the SAMP began--in 2012. Four years after the Third Runway opened

We argue that today there is ten times less public concern today than during the Third Runway era. Despite having a dozen years to prepare for the SAMP, local governments are just as indifferent. We are all boiled frogs.

That does not mean the issues do not merit concern or action. But it's important to understand why this is in order to do something about it.

The Third Runway was a simple story: stop. Stopping construction of The Great Wall of Sea-Tac was a clear goal. OK, now what? What is the positive case to be made? What is the proposal to make life better?

Human beings are terrible at aligning data with perception. Numbers are important because airports are required to have them. We aren't. That immediately puts us at a disadvantage. They have a clear story to tell. We argue over 33% or 21% rather than noticing that they are all many times worse than now.

Part of it is that most people or electeds never cared and will never care. They believe the airport is an intrinsic good. Once and for all we should accept that reality.

Another factor is that few of us care about the future. We care about now. We trust the future to take care of itself.

What do people want if there is no immediate relief? No 'making the airplanes go somewhere else'? We've had decades to think about it and almost no one has.

STNI has.

Our legislative agenda has always had two components: short term and long term. The short term is like planting trees: we may not live to see the fruit, but it is deeply satisfying to feel like we're doing something that will eventually get there.

What we really need to focus on this time is that future. That means acknowledging that we are currently not well-prepared. We think their numbers are rubbish. But they have numbers. And a plan. By falling back on all the things everyone else has tried over the years we're playing the Casino's game.

We can get where we need to get to, but only by doing what they do: having plans and proposals that think 1-2-5-10-20 years down the road rather than 'now'.

It's the only rational approach. Because one way or another, this will never end.

1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike - Wikipedia
FAA SEA Airport Capacity Profile 2018
Annual Operations and Passengers
SAMP Draft EA Appendix A Forecast and Operational Assumptions

To learn how you can make a difference, read our STNI: 2026 Legislative Agenda and STNI.info/subscribe

In our last episode (A-Weighted), we talked about just one of the ways noise is misrepresented to the public. Even the way it is measured misleads decision makers (and the public) as to how bad it is–using a system that depicts flights only a few hundred feet from the runway with the same numbers as routine yard work tasks.

This time we talk about a related topic, something that will sting: the main reason we keep losing. Airport communities have never really agreed on what winning means–unless it can be defined as “making the airplanes go somewhere else.”

Why have improper noise measurements gone unchanged in 50 years? The same reason air quality monitoring has languished. A lack of interest in anything beyond some current crisis.

Even kids playing sports beyond an introductory level are taught that winning matters. Participation is great, but team success is even better–even if it takes time to get there. People don’t play team sports very long without that drive for shared success. That includes coaching and a willingness to change both strategies and tactics to get there over time.

Another airport myth, as powerful as ‘second airport’, is the lie that community engagement is the key to success. That theory has been tested over and over–including during the Third Runway–at the cost of millions of dollars. Apart from the regular stream of weak legal challenges to flight paths, the net result of misplaced faith in ‘community engagement’ has only made everyone cynical about making any useful progress.

Why do these myths persist? Very few people ever become truly engaged in any airport advocacy.

The awkward discussion is that people are encouraged to confuse participation with effective strategy. In this game? Everyone’s a winner simply by virtue of showing up.

With those perverse incentives, people can spend any amount of time re-inventing the wheel: re-learning things already known, attempting to build community support that is, in fact, unnecessary. And be rewarded for both.

As so many politicians will tell you, “People just want to feel heard.” Is that how you really feel? If so, you can definitely get that. Better listening sessions.

When people are encouraged to define empathy and trying as the measures of success, real success on such technical issues will always remain out of reach.

Our home page states that the SAMP will lead to at least a third more operations. We became confident of that the moment we started looking at data from 1996. It’s obvious if one takes the Airport Director’s Dad Joke seriously.

“An airport is an ongoing construction project where passengers and airplanes are constantly getting in the way.”

Our airport communities have never taken that seriously. Instead, everyone treats airports like one-off construction projects and never look at that one word: ongoing. They never really end.

The SAMP began in 2012, four years after the Third Runway opened. Imagine building a freeway and then four years later telling residents that yet another freeway needed to be built in the same spot.

If an issue requires ongoing management, but only ever gets looked at one project at a time, something is deeply wrong, not just with the game, but with the fact that people keep playing it using the same losing strategies and tactics.

But there’s nothing stopping anyone from adopting a better approach. Even kids playing sports know that. They want to win more than just participate.

To learn how you can make a difference, read our STNI: 2026 Legislative Agenda and

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Last week told the crazy story of Tagamet to describe something economists call perverse incentives--how people can waste so much money addressing a problem in the wrong way, you can't even get research money to figure out how to address it in the right way.

In another episode, we described No Data, No Problem. How industries slow walk research for decades by saying we can't fix it until we get better research.

We've received some comments telling us these ideas are too abstract. So, this week we're talking about something everyone can understand: the noise. Or rather, how noise is measured.In the 1990's, at the behest of the PSRC, the Port began installing noise monitoring equipment. To date it has spent over $15,000,000 on three version of high end noise monitoring equipment. You can track each noise event at our SEL Monitoring page. If you look at the Noise Exposure Maps for the Part 150 Study, those 'rings' seem to indicate that the noise levels, even right near the runways are at most '85'.  And yet, in real life, your neighbor mowing his lawn next door is also 85 decibels. How can this be? How can that sound be an '85' and the sound registered next to the airfield also be '85'? It's because all 'decibels' are not created equal.

So what is a decibel? It's certainly not the number in those DNL rings. But what about the numbers registered by the noise monitors? Are they broken? A scam?The decibels used by almost all governments are referred to as 'A-weighted', which means 'adjusted for human hearing'. And that is done by severely reducing the value of low frequencies (bass), which we call 'turning down the bass on your stereo.'

When you measure aircraft noise with A-weighting, the readings tend to be much lower than expected.

Why is this important? Because, as anyone who lives under the flight path knows, low frequencies are a huge component of commercial aircraft noise. The rumble that shakes your house should be a very unusual experience. It almost never happens in the natural world except in case of danger. And whether you notice it or not, your body reacts to it in very specific ways. Ways that make a trip to the movie theater exhilarating. Once in a while.

Unfortunately, our bodies were not designed to have this experience hundreds of times a day. Your physiology considers every flight a 'danger' and responds accordingly. Constant triggers tend to lead to a variety of chronic illnesses.

Why would the Port spend so much money for a state-of-the-art system and continue to undercut the real noise reporting value?

We close the episode by suggesting that State and Federal lawmakers might not understand the intensity of the noise problem if the number on a report says that a guy mowing his lawn next door is the same as the number registered by the noise monitors when a 747 flies directly over head!

It's time to turn off that tone-control and publish the unfiltered noise data. It's time to end A-weighting.

A-Weighting (Wikipedia)
Low frequency noise and annoyance
Annoyance caused by the low-frequency sound...

STNI: Legislation 2026

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We open this week's episode by talking about how little information sharing there ever really is among any airport community. Even candidate forums on airport issues here are now semi-private!

More broadly, we  are not alone with airport expansions. But on the plus side, more and more, we're noticing other airport communities using our resources. Which is great! Traditionally, few airport communities share information--except on very broad federal legislation that never goes anywhere.

To help everyone, we continue to experiment with ways to make it easier to search our database. (Among other things the new Studies and Airport Law Cheat Sheet pages.) We continue to be a bunch of old nerds trying to collect data, not only the flight paths and noise but also politics, socioeconomics, and especially history.

Once we understood how bad FAA law is, we wanted to understand why there had been so little local opposition to that law--other than just 'flight paths'.

Much of it comes down to that lack of information sharing. There's no Yelp for airport communities. That is why there has been such a thriving market for airport consultants and people doing the wrong things over and over.

Last week we considered a story so crazy it could be a made-for-tv movie.

This week we tell a story just as crazy, but with a much happier ending. And one which we hope helps explain a little why people have been making so many of the same mistakes since.

The first billion dollar drug was Tagamet, created to address ulcers, a rampant disease you don't often hear about now because after wasting so much money addressing the problem the wrong way, people finally started doing so the right way. Once a problem goes away, it's amazing how quickly it fades from memory. 

Along came Barry Marshall, an Australian researcher who found the real cause by intentionally giving himself an ulcer to prove his point. There are easier ways to win a Nobel Prize, but few more useful. His stunt saved hundreds of thousands of people from needless suffering and ended the waste of billions of dollars.

For decades, residents in airport communities have been focusing on immediate relief and not getting to root causes. It's hard to tell people who are suffering they're wasting their money. They're desperate. But that is part of the reason why we keep reaching for Tagamet and leaving the disease unchecked.

One lesson we've taken from airport advocacy has been how focused everyone has been on blaming the FAA for everything. But look closer. A lot of the decisions that made airport expansion possible were (and are) encouraged by your local electeds.

 "No politician will tell you they support noise and pollution." But time after time, they continue to choose "jobs and growth" over community health and well-being.  Regardless of what people say, you can tell what they really believe by the votes. And it is that, as much as the FAA, that not only make current expansions possible--they actively prevent research into ever making it stop.

If you remain skeptical, we hope you'll share information on your community's airport expansion. How are things going with your consultants? The way we end all the Tagamet is by sharing our experiences, our data, our outcomes, and doing the real research we should have been doing all along. If we had, we'd be at the right place now.

Solve for Sea-Tac. Solve for every airport.

Barry Marshall

STNI: Legislation 2026

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Last week we talked about how the SAMP EA can say that the air quality is within standards. There was this (brief) 'golden age' of NEPA where you could get pollutants reviewed and problems fixed. It made dramatic improvements to the environment and public health.

This week, we start providing some history on the Sea-Tac Communities Plan, our 'golden age' following the second runway. And how that rapidly fell apart.

The STCP was passed before the dawn of what you now call DNL65. It established what became the series of zoning 'rings' around the airport. The innermost ring became the noise lands--the property buyout buffer to protect residents outside along the north, west and south sides of the runways. You know these now as North SeaTac Park to the north and the Des Moines Creek Business Park to the south. But there was also a west side.

Within days of the plan's adoption, the same King County Council which approved it, also took up a motion to rezone the west side to allow moving Boeing's headquarters!

Residents were livid and created the Westside Hilltop Survival Committee to fight. Did they 'win'? Yes and no.

Yes, they stopped Boeing from moving. No, they got none of the relief they actually wanted. And double-plus no, it also set in motion a process that unwound every bit of trust it took three years to build. And a lot worse.

Since Boeing wasn't there, the property was left in play just as airport operations started moving past the capacity of two runways.

But when voters repeatedly said "Hello, no!" to siting another airport, or expanding rail service in any way, the State and PSRC saw those 30 acres as the easy path to adding additional aviation capacity.

Hello, Third Runway.

To add a final piece of bitter irony, the FAA had just commissioned a study of the STCP which praised it as the model of community engagement for all future airports. But by the time it was published iin 1977, it was already too late.

Can airport communities ever live in harmony with airport operators? We had a shot at it, with strong environmental protections that gave even small groups a seat at the table, but a financially weak Port of Seattle and a local government that failed.

Now? Things are reversed. Community protections are weak and the Port of Seattle is, for the first time in its history, doing better than any government in the region--including the State of Washington.

But another part of the new reality is 'voluntary'. Which means that the FAA is happy to have airports spend their own money to help communities. The Port is one of the only airports that has the finance to do so. And the Port claims to be the greenest airport in North America.

STNI: Legislation 2026

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