Seven Jets, Millions of Fans, and a Malcontent 

Seattle’s annual Seafair is a city-wide hootenanny celebrating all things maritime.

The summer festival comprises eight-weeks of neighborhood events which culminate in the annual Torchlight Parade—a nighttime extravaganza that draws upward of three-hundred-thousand spectators—and the famed Lake Washington hydroplane races.

By sea and by land, Seafair revelers demonstrate en masse the effects a few weeks of sunshine can have on a populace habituated to rain. Yet for all Seafair’s nautical and terrestrial delights, the party wouldn’t be complete without the Blue Angels flashing across the clear(ish) skies of the Puget Sound August.

Seafair 2022 will see the U.S. Navy’s celebrated aerial  demonstration team debut its new F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet aircraft. The new planes are 25% larger than the legacy Hornets they replaced, and festival promoters—in the inimitable fashion of carnival-callers—are touting them as "Bigger. Louder. Faster."

The crowds drawn to the yearly Blue Angels' Seafair performance are inevitably salted with protesters come out like lugubrious vermin to protest the noise, jet-exhaust, or promotion of the military. Happily, most spectators enthusiastically acknowledge the superb airmanship and patriotic spectacle for which the Blue Angels are so widely known and highly regarded.

This year, as in some years past, the Blue Angels have received initial approval to perform the sneak pass, a breathtaking maneuver that involves one of the six Super Hornets breaking formation and flying as low as 50-feet over the waters of Lake Washington at close to the speed of sound.

The F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet aircraft creates a more powerful sonic-boom than its Legacy F-18 predecessor—a fact that was convincingly, albeit inadvertently, demonstrated in 2021 when structures on Naval Air Facility El Centro, California suffered an estimated $180,000 in damages after a Blue Angels pilot passed within one-hundred-feet of them during a practice maneuver.

A Naval report of the incident states the flyby cracked windows, fractured ceiling-tiles, knocked down shelves, and dislodged sheathing in two shear walls designed to help a base fire department building withstand earthquakes. What’s more, a dozen Navy personnel are said to have suffered ringing in the ears and headaches following the instance.

Navy investigators assert the new F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet creates a "noticeably larger localized sonic airflow signature" than the predecessor Hornets, which increases the "probability and severity of future occurrences" such as the damage sustained at El Centro.

To prevent another such incident, Rear Adm. Robert Westendorff, Chief of Naval Air Training, implemented four safety measures, including a slight reduction in the maximum speed for the low-flying sneak pass and the banning of the maneuver within two-hundred-feet of any structure, vehicle or personnel.

The incident investigation and recommendations were released in response to a federal Freedom of Information Act request from Glen Milner, a Washington peace activist and researcher with the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.

Milner—despite residing in an America made and kept free by the sacrifices of military men whose boots he may not be fit to fill—has protested for years what he calls the militarization of Seafair, and sought to find out more about the Super Hornet aircraft.

FMI: www.navy.mil