Reaching a position on the proposed third runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has not been easy for the Seattle Council on Airport Affairs.  Is questioning the huge investment for the third runway the same thing as opposition to commercial aviation?  In the minds of many civic leaders, the answer to that question is, Yes.  They assume that if you do not whole-heartedly support the runway project, and Sea-Tac expansion, you are anti-aviation, anti-progress, anti-business.
SCAA is none of those things.  Civil aviation is here to stay;  it's an important part of the infrastructure that supports the economic activity on which most of us depend for our livelihoods.  SCAA is not anti-business:  most of our individual members work for businesses, own businesses, are retired from business, or depend on business in some other way.  So, we have been very slow to reach a conclusion that the Port of Seattle is probably making a huge mistake in promoting a third runway at Sea-Tac Airport.
But after long and careful study, we find the rationale for construction of the proposed third runway is seriously lacking.  In our last editorial, we reviewed the arguments in favor of building it, and found them insufficient.  We pointed out that expansion at Sea-Tac will not be able to meet future demand:  there simply is not enough room for the needed facilities.  The FAA and the Port of Seattle have said that the runway will NOT increase capacity, and they have also said that it WILL.  But either way they predict that future demand will soon outrun the capacity of Sea-Tac, even with an additional runway.  Port Commissioners are beginning to admit what others have been saying for years -- a new regional airport, not located at Sea-Tac, will be needed. 
Public concern about airports usually begins with the noise that overflights cause.  In this regard, Sea-Tac is in a very bad location.  Its flight corridors must pass over densely settled areas, and a new runway would create new corridors, exposing yet more people to noise.  That's the first unanswerable argument against Sea-Tac expansion:  too much additional noise - with no noise-reduction plan in place or envisioned.  At the very least, construction of a third runway should be put on hold till the Port comes up with a reasonable plan to reduce noise impacts to an appropriate level, and a state commission should evaluate potential sites for a second regional airport in Western Washington.

Even if the airplanes that use Sea-Tac were whisper-quiet, the third runway would be a poor notion, because of the environmental harm resulting from the construction itself - the filling-in of wetlands, the increased pollution of near-by streams, and the irreparable damage to already-stressed wildlife habitat.   Sea-Tac Airport's history of stream pollution --- too long to report in this space -- is documented back into the late 1940s, and it continues to this day.  The Airport has been out of compliance with the terms of its present five-year water-pollution permit for at least the last two years, with no improvement in sight.  More activity will only make things worse.  Even the minimal construction activity to date has caused major stream damage.
Further, the safety of the proposed runway layout has been questioned by experts.  Three parallel active runways, working in poor visibility, would create terrible risks of on-the-ground collisions.  In the U.S., reportable near-misses and actual collisions rose by 30 per cent from 1999 to 2000, according to the FAA itself.  The Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation found it necessary to make a special report on this alarming situation to Congress in late June, with an urgent call for many changes.
And then there's the cost.  To turn a hillside into flat ground, as Sea-Tac wishes, is enormously expensive - they need 19.84 million cubic yards of fill, most of which must be purchased.  It's been two years now since the Port staff has shared any cost estimates with the public, but we know that as their problems continue, the costs must be rising.  The official estimates have shot up from an initial $229 million to the June 1999 figure of $773 million (not counting interest on hundreds of millions in borrowings).  With interest included, the runway would actually cost over $2 billion and rising. 

And Sea-Tac thinks that it needs another terminal to complete their plans - at a cost of only $3 billion.
For all of this, travelers get a shiny new three-terminal airport with one adequate runway (the main one closest to the terminal) and two substandard ones - all of them too close to one another to operate efficiently, good weather or bad - and still the region will not be able to meet air-travel needs.
All of this - noise, environmental harm, and excessive costs -- might be barely tolerable, if the third-runway program were the only possible solution.  But it is not.  Nearly all big metropolitan areas make use of multiple airports.  Sea-Tac's plan is to put everything into one airport.  Some places (Denver, Paris) have built new airports where environmental problems are minimal, noise impacts few-to-none, and space is more than adequate.  There are other, under-utilized airports in Washington.  The State has thousands of square miles of land - flat land - that is not built-up into cities.  For the price of a part-time, poor-weather runway and a third Sea-Tac terminal, our State could and should build a new, BIG, international airport that really will meet air-travel needs for the century ahead.
For these reasons, SCAA believes Seattle should re-evaluate its support for the proposed third runway at Sea-Tac.  We think better alternatives exist, such as early implementation of a temporary multi-airport system using existing facilities.  In the meantime serious studies should be made to locate sites in Western Washington where the real airport of the 21^st Century can be built,  with minimal environmental harm and zero noise impacts, with room for several full-length runways with proper separation and the safest-possible layout.   The needs of the future demand nothing less.◄  (Click Here for Page 4)