Report: FAA gives Paine Field go-ahead for commercial flights in March
Feb 20, 2019, 3:12 PM | Updated: 3:32 pm
Paine Field in Everett. (AP file photo)
(AP file photo)
The Everett Herald reported Wednesday that Everett’s Paine Field Airport has been cleared for commercial flights starting in March.
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According to the Herald, the Federal Aviation Administration has given the go-ahead for Alaska Airlines to begin flights out of Paine Field on March 4, and United Airlines on March 31.
There will be 24 daily departures from Paine combined between the two airlines. Alaska and United began accepting reservations for flights out of the Everett airport last November
This comes after the Alaska had originally intended to begin service out of Everett on Feb. 11. The partial federal government shutdown over immigration, though, caused the airline to push that date back.
The saga for Paine Field has been the source of a good deal of controversy. While a recent FAA study claimed that the airport’s commercial flights wouldn’t cause problems people living in the surrounding neighborhood, residents disagreed.
“I went out with a decibel reader, and just a normal jet flying over is 85 decibels,” Valerie Krueger told KIRO Radio back in October. Krueger is a resident of the area that lives two miles north of Paine Field, and claimed that her neighborhood wasn’t included in the FAA’s impact report.
“To leave those neighborhoods out of the study is particularly maddening,” she added. For reference, 85 decibels is generally equivalent to the volume of a garbage disposal at three feet.
That all came after a long, drawn-out legal saga that saw the city of Mukilteo challenge an FAA environmental approval in federal court in 2016.
With the official stamp of approval from the FAA, that saga now comes to a close.
