By Zachariah Bryan
January 16, 2013
Well, we don't have the answer to the question in the headline quite
yet, but because of increased interest in our stories on airplane noise,
we thought we might point you to a handy tool.
Port of Seattle Spokesman Perry Cooper, who has been involved with
the rolling out of the Greener Skies program (which involves a smoother,
slightly less noisy landing process but resultes in more clustered air
traffic) showed us Aircraft Webtrak.
It's an online tool that you can use to track current and past flight
traffic. Besides being informative, it's pretty cool to play around
with.
We haven't played around with it too much yet, but it appears flight
traffic really isn't that heavy in Ballard, except for the occasional
plane from Anchorage, AK which cuts across Sunset Hill at 65th St NW.
As we reported before,
Loyal Heights resident David Ortman has filed a lawsuit against the
Port of Seattle and the FAA because of airplane noise. He states that
the airport's third runway, which was built 1,7000 feet west of the
center runway, has caused planes to fly right over his home in the
middle of the night. He claims that the increased airplane noise reduces
his property value.
The Ballard News-Tribune did receive a few calls and emails from
other residents in the area disregarding his claims. If you have an
opinion, don't be afraid to write a letter to the editor to zachb@robinsonnews.com
Webtrak does give some credibility to the complaints from Beacon Hill residents who stormed the Greener Skies public meeting
at the Ballard Branch Library (at the time, they didn't have their own
meeting), as many airplanes funnel in right over their rooftops.
A recent Crosscut article
points out that though FAA and Port of Seattle officials largely
dismiss any noise decibel increase as negligible, the 1.5 decibel
increase is still 30 percent more noise.
Though airplanes are supposed to be quieter with the new landing
procedure, the increased efficiency causes the flight paths to be
tighter, meaning more noise for a narrow strip and less noise on the
outside margins of the flight paths.
Ballard has no noise monitoring stations like other neighborhoods, but the situation appears much less dramatic.
We'll try and get more specific numbers of how many flights pass over
Ballard in the near future. Until then, check out the Aircraft Webtrak
tool for yourself at https://www.portseattle.org/Environmental/Noise/Noise-Abatement/Pages/Ai...
Source: http://www.ballardnewstribune.com
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