Big ‘ol jet airliner

For the folks who have not had the pleasure of landing at Seattle’s SeaTac International Airport, here is the low-down:

It’s a clusterfuck. Bad parking, bad check-in facilities, insufficient screening area and outdated baggage moving equipment. The facility was built to handle half of the traffic it gets these days and although they keep upgrading it, it is piecemeal and looks it.

To make it all worse, it is the only commercial facility the area has and due to the uber-NIMBY attitude around here, it is the only one the area will ever have.

Or maybe not.

Eight miles northeast of the SeaTac Airport (as the crow flies) there is the King County Regional Airport. Locals such as myself call it ‘Boeing Field’ because it is surrounded by the original Boeing facility and the company’s former world headquarters, as well as the finishing plant for, I believe, some of their 737 line.

During WWII, Boeing Field saw the testing and then the building of thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-29 Super Fortresses. When I lived within the Seattle city limits, I could see and hear planes taking off from Boeing Field and some of my more elderly neighbors could tell you about the dozens of Fortresses that would leave the factories on a daily basis for service in the war and got a smile when the Museum of Flight would fire up their B-17.

Nowadays, other than a few 737’s, the only people who use Boeing Field are a number of private corporate jets, some private pilots who can afford the fees and freight companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.

But last week, Southwest Airlines made the county an offer they couldn’t refuse.

The want to move out of SeaTac Int’l and down to Boeing Field. They will pay $130 million to build an eight-gate passenger terminal, parking garage, office space, rental-car space and accommodations for cruise-ship traffic and buses. They will hold the lease on these facilities for 50 years, and after that, they will give it to the county FREE OF CHARGE.

Remember when I said the offer was too good for the county to refuse? I was wrong, because the county said, “We’ll have to think about it�.

Freeing up space at SeaTac, free property upgrades, more capacity to move people in and out of the city which equals tourist money (estimated at $520 million), etc, etc. Win-win situation, right?

We’ll, first there are the ‘noise pollution’ whiners; Boeing Field is currently a 24hour facility. Although they like to say that flights are restricted from 2100 to 0600, I lived there for seven years and that is a crock o’ shit. 747’s loaded to the gills with freight launch out of there all night, just not every 10-15 minutes like during the day. Southwest has fewer than a half dozen flights that land between the hours of 2100 to 0600 so the ‘noise pollution’ increase will be virtually nil.

Then there are the traffic weenies; “Oh, we’re going to have to build extra off-ramps and a couple more lanes to handle the traffic!� cough* Bullshit! Cough*. Boeing Field is actually closer to Interstate 5 than SeaTac is and there are already on and off ramps at the north and south ends of the airport from the heyday of the Boeing plants that can more than handle the traffic.

But the biggest obstacle to this deal going through is local celebrity, Alaska Airlines, to which Southwest is the biggest competitor..

Alaska is pissed off that they didn’t think of this idea themselves and is demanding to be allowed to use the facilities that Southwest is building, free of charge. They feel that they’re already paying enough for their use of SeaTac and think that this should be included.

OR, they want to make the same deal and cut Southwest out of the bargaining.

This is going to be interesting.

And because this is the infamously incompetent King County government I’m talking about, probably ‘flat-forehead’ frustrating as well.