Stock up on food and water. Prepare your air raid shelter. Get some earplugs for your dogs and cats.
The Blue Angels will be occupying our air space for four days, starting with two practice sessions on Thursday. Sure, the show can be fun if you’re watching it out on the lake. But here in the CD we live right under the area where they make their tight turns to regroup in between tricks – usually just a few hundred feet above our roofs. It’s as close to a military invasion as most of us are ever likely to see.
Here’s the full schedule for practices and real shows. Note that the I-90 floating bridge will be closed for each:
- Thursday 7/30 – 9:45am to Noon (Practice)
- Thursday 7/30 – 1:15pm to 2:30pm (Practice)
- Friday 8/1 – 12:45pm to 2:40pm (Practice)
- Saturday 8/2 – 12:45 to 2:40pm (Real Show)
- Sunday 8/3 – 12:45 to 2:40pm (Real Show)
WSDOT suggests that you cross the lake at least an hour before the closures to insure you make it to your destination.
Godspeed to you all!
Just a matter o’ time ’til one of them comes crashing down into one of our houses!! been dreadding it for 10 years!!! duck!!!!
why do these tools come here every year. Face facts, they are lame!
I don’t know, I may be in the minority, but I secretly love it. I try to get atop a parking garage or structure every year to check it out. Zoom, zoom!
jesus, dude, do you also sit around waiting for the atom bomb to drop,too? paranoia will destroy ya
SeaFair and the Blue Angels are always one of the highlights of our Summer. I hope they never stop coming.
You are worried about the blue angels but not about the huge cargo and passenger planes that fly over head each and every hour every friggin’ day?
I love the Blue Angels for a short time each summer. It is the commercial jets that fly over all hours of the day and night that I hate and wish would change their flight patterns to go over Medina and Clyde Hill.
But I HATE the endless screech of AIR TRAFFIC that assaults us everyday every 5 seconds from 4am til past midnight (depending on which way the wind is blowing)!!!!
THAT is THE biggest CRIME against the good people of central Seattle. Who allowed that airport to be built knowing that this is exactly what would happen????
i hope nobody think it’s just happenstance that the flight patterns travel over the poorest neighborhoods in seattle.
This is our favorite time of the summer at my house. The kids get excited and look forward to them every year. We watch all the real shows from Leschi and the practices from our porch in Squire Park. No worries here.
You may find them entertaining, but make no mistake what their real mission is. From the official Blue Angels web site:
The Blue Angels’ mission is to enhance Navy and Marine Corps recruiting efforts and to represent the naval service to the United States, its elected leadership and foreign nations.
also from the site:
How much fuel is used over the course of a year, including transportation, training, etc.?
Over a one-year period, the squadron, including Fat Albert, burns approximately 3.1 million gallons of fuel.
I grew up in the cd and the blue angels are the best thing in town!! allyu wusses put your earplugs in and hush up and enjoy
I suggest that the zipcodes of passengers flying out of SeaTac be collected, and approach/departure routes be planned based on those data.
Most airport sites were chosen many decades ago. I bet nobody involved then had any idea of how popular airflight would be.
That said, they typically chose out-of-the-way cheap under-used areas. Hence all the fog issues at lots of airports: they reclaimed foggy, marshy areas. I suspect that land-prices also tended to site airports near to disadvantaged areas. Or have the disadvantaged areas subsequently grown up there because of the airports. You can guess that it will be a bit of both!
Solution: disperse flights and use alternate airports. You’ve seen how well that’s going down at Paine Field in Everett!
Moses Lake and very (MagLev) rapid rail transit is an obvious solution. We’re so good at quickly building rail transit….
I doubt the siting of SeaTac was done to intentionally direct noise our direction. It was built in 1944, before big jets had arrived with their noise issues. Plus, old prop planes and the less crowded airspace of the day didn’t require the long approaches of today’s big jets, so I’m guessing most flight plans didn’t take them over the CD back then.
Planners also didn’t have a lot of options. The runways need to generally face north/south to face the prevailing wind directions. They can’t point due north due to the tall buildings downtown. And they can’t point northwesterly either, or else they’d interfere with Boeing Field flight paths. So they set the runways to point slightly northeasterly instead (340/160 degrees), bringing flights straight through the middle of the CD.
But, the continued traffic over the neighborhood is a political decision. A couple of years ago there was a plan to divert a portion of traffic to the east after takeoff, over the north part of Mercer Island and cities on the east side of the lake. Needless to say, that didn’t get too far…
There might be a silver lining in the new world of higher fuel prices. The older, noisier jets are rapidly being phased out due to their high fuel consumption. I’ve noticed that the worst offenders over us are the MD80s flown by American and Alaska, both in the process of being replaced by much quieter, new 737s.
I’m not sure I understand why you object to their stated mission. I’m guessing it is because you think recruiting volunteers for the Navy and Marine Corps is bad.
Objecting to how the Navy and Marine Corps are used is certainly reasonable. Objecting to the existence of the Navy and Marine Corps (if you don’t recruit, do they cease to exist? does the draft get reinstated?), not so much.
I agree…those MD-80s are the worst. I’m glad they are being phased out.
It would be really interesting to see some kind of chart that shows what has happened to aircraft noise over the years. I’ve lived in Leschi for 13 years and in my opinion the frequency of annoyingly loud aircraft flying over seems like it is down quite a bit.
i wasn’t making any point about airport location, but the flight patterns that do not take routes over madison park/madrona/leschi or mercer island/medina for that matter and go directly over our neighborhood and beacon hill are about political and economic clout.
But oh how I wish we would add a second airport at Paine Field in Everett and take some of the burden off the ‘hood—in the summer especially. They toss it around from time to time, but everyone up in Snoho screams bloody murder. Go figure. :O)
We are able to live the way we do because of the military. The Blues are only here a few days a year.
It’s funny, the planes used to drive me crazy when I lived in various locales north of the canal. As I read these comments I was wondering why I’ve never noticed air traffic noise since moving to the CD. Then it hit me. I must live in a noisier area of the neighborhood. My soundscape is dominated by sirens, bus noise, car horns, car alarms, townhome construction, sub-woofers, windows being rattled by sub-woofers, people yelling, people singing, more construction (apologies to my neighbors). Planes? What planes?
I think a Blue Angel just passed overhead! Brings me back to all the air shows my Dad took us to. My brothers and I would always chant “SON-IC BOOM, SON-IC BOOM” to no avail. Maybe this time….
I think nice Seattle could use a good SONIC BOOM!!!
They do go over Madrona, they just don’t go over the lake. I really hate it when there is a lot of cloud cover and then they really dip down into the valley at high speeds and my house shakes!
While my feeling regarding the Blue Angels depends on my mood and what I am thinking about from time to time. The noises are hard on pets.
But, the growth in the number of planes and the constant noise of it is worse. This constant noise pollution is not good for people, rich or poor, young or old and the in-betweens. Given that people living in dense urban areas tend to have less privacy and more interactions and annoyances (not that other people can be annoying) with which to deal, planes should be directed over less residential areas and less dense residential areas where it would affect fewer people. I hate missing some part of a piece of music or a radio program as one of the large planes drowns out all other sound. I detest having conversations with family, friends and neighbors interrupted wondering if I should shout or just stop talking. I resent having to watch the lips of my family and friends move as they attempt to be loud enough to make themselves heard.
Noise pollution can contribute to annoyance and aggression, hypertension, high stress levels,hearing loss, sleep disturbances, and other related issues such as forgetfulness (hmmI suppose it could serve as a convenient excuse), severe depression and at times panic attacks.
If we want density to work for humans then as a society we have to ensure that the dense communities are mixed with some less dense areas and parks and are actually livable and pleasant.
The daily horror of jet noise is not, as I’ve often thought, a punishment for living in in a commute-free location…. or… maybe it is….
It is, however, INHUMANE. How to stop the abuse?
I thought a Sonic Boom might be nice for Seattle since we’ve already had the Sonic bust…..
I love them!
Their safety record is good but not perfect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Blue_Angels_South_Carolina