Is Everett’s Paine Field the Solution to Sea-Tac’s Congestion?

At Everett’s Paine Field on a recent summer afternoon, 20 or so passengers were quietly queued up at the Alaska Airlines ticket counter, waiting for a flight to Anchorage. Except for them, the terminal was nearly empty. The coffee shop was closed. One couple sat in comfortable chairs in the otherwise empty baggage area.

No planes were yet at the two gates. No cars were lined up at the entrance. The parking lots had plenty of space.

Paine Field’s commercial service got off to a promising start in 2019, when passenger volume hit one million passengers. But then COVID-19 hit, and the airport has struggled since, recording just 636,000 passengers last year with service from only one airline, Alaska. Its flights from Paine are focused on leisure travel and are limited primarily to Alaska, the West Coast and Hawaii.

Passengers who use the airport are untroubled by its doldrums. They appreciate its comfort and convenience, even though ticket prices are high compared to Sea-Tac.

“Any time I can, I fly Paine over Sea-Tac,” said Bob Donegan, president of Ivar’s seafood restaurant chain. “From the parking lot, through security and to the gate is no more than 10 minutes. The TSA people are polite and friendly,” he said, and in the gate area passengers are offered drinks and snacks.

Elsewhere, air travel has returned to pre-pandemic levels: On July 7, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport hit 191,000 passengers—just shy of its all-time record. This summer the airport recorded eight of its 10 all-time busiest days. Congestion in and out of the terminal continues to build.

Not so much in Everett, despite a recent, self-effacing name change—to Seattle Paine Field International Airport (PAE)—to try to lure traffic northward. Officials acknowledge that Paine has not lived up to the expectations of Snohomish County or Propeller Inc., the private owner of its passenger terminal.

In 2019, when the airport was gearing up for commercial flights, it was to have three airlines: Alaska, Southwest and United. It boasted a brand-new, two-gate passenger terminal with lounge-like seating and easy parking. The facility was intended to lure business and leisure travelers fed up with Sea-Tac’s traffic hassles and crowding.

But Southwest never started service, and United stopped flying there in October 2021 as travel fell off during the pandemic.

Paine’s problems affect the wider region, as Sea-Tac congestion is accelerating with the return to pre-pandemic record growth. Studies forecast that Puget Sound demand for commercial aviation service will double by 2050, leaving the region with no room for around 27 million enplanements.

Sea-Tac is not expected to add new aircraft gates until 2032 at the earliest. Meanwhile, efforts to find a site for a new airport have stalled. A state working group, authorized by the Legislature in 2023 to study transportation issues, just had its first meeting on July 11 and has yet to fill several key business and environmental positions.

Snohomish County officials are optimistic that more passengers will choose the convenience of Paine Field as Sea-Tac congestion worsens. The county is finalizing a new master plan that forecasts 4.3 million annual passengers by 2040.

With 1,300 acres, the airport has ample room to expand its passenger terminal and parking space, said Joshua Marcy, Paine Field’s director. “We have all the things in place to help meet the demand,” he said. “We hope to see demand go up. The question is how to do we do it in the right way to serve the community.”

Marcy said the airport has demonstrated it can be a good neighbor to Mukilteo and other nearby communities, which fought Paine Field expansion for many years. And as the place where Boeing builds wide-body 767s and 777s, Paine also is home to several aerospace suppliers and service providers able to support airport expansion.

But then why has Paine been slow to recover? Like it, many small-market airports around the country continue to struggle. Bellingham International, for instance, just lost Southwest Airlines service.

Paine also has some peculiar handicaps. Demand at airports is shaped largely by the destinations offered, frequency of service, air-fare prices and accessibility. Alaska Airlines, as the sole scheduled airline serving Paine, controls most of those factors and faces no competitive challenge.

Alaska recently reported record quarterly earnings, but it has been buffeted by many of the same headwinds afflicting other air carriers. It has a shortage of airplanes, in part due to Boeing’s troubles, and is facing higher fuel and labor costs. Alaska Air also is shouldering some major new projects, including the acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines and a costly renovation of its ticketing area at the north end of the Sea-Tac terminal.

In this context, expanding passenger and aircraft-handling services at Paine, so close to Sea-Tac, may be seen by Alaska as a poor use of resources. The airline acknowledges that business travel—the most profitable—has not grown at Paine as hoped, but will not comment on its future strategy.

“Seattle continues to be Alaska’s primary hub. Although Paine Field recently celebrated its 5^th anniversary, that period encompasses the pandemic, so the airport dynamics have changed substantially from 2019,” wrote Alaska spokesman Ray Lane in an email.

“Our initial strategy was that Paine Field would allow for greater ease for north Puget Sound region business travelers to head out on quick business trips; however, as the number of those meetings dwindled post-pandemic, we’ve shifted to PAE service to be more leisure-focused,” Lane wrote.

Alaska currently offers service from Paine to Anchorage, Honolulu (seasonally), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Palm Springs, San Diego, San Francisco, Orange County and Tucson.

Donegan, Ivar’s president and a Richmond Beach resident, is exactly the sort of passenger Paine Field’s operators were hoping to attract—a business traveler living in the fast-growing north King-south Snohomish community. But the pandemic and some of the airport’s self-imposed limitations have hampered that growth.

Paine Field dates to 1936 as a Depression-era project envisioned as a major commercial airport. That idea did not pan out, and in 1941 the military took it over as World War II began. With the decline of Air Force use in the early 1960s, the airport took on new life with industrial development. Boeing chose the airport for construction of the 747 in 1966 and later the 787 Dreamliner.

Aerospace activity has attracted a wide range of industrial activity to Paine Field, along with general aviation. In recent years it has been a major tourist attraction, with Boeing’s Future of Flight tours, the Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum, and the Museum of Flight Restoration Center. The county estimates Paine Field supports 46,000 direct jobs and produces $60 billion in business revenues for the region.

But commercial aviation at Paine was slow to get off the ground. Alaska had expressed interest in flying there in the late 1990s, but Mukilteo and other nearby communities, along with the Snohomish County Council, opposed scheduled air service because of noise and other environmental impacts. The tide began turning when the Federal Aviation Administration said the county must consider air service as a condition of receiving federal aid for the airport.

The battle went on for years. In 2015 the county narrowly approved an agreement with Propeller Airports to finance and build a two-gate terminal on airport land. It was not until a year later that the federal Court of Appeals denied the communities’ appeal of the FAA’s approval of service. Alaska Airlines inaugurated service in March 2019 with a hop to Portland.

In an approach unusual in the United States, but commonplace internationally, the airport terminal was privately financed and built by Propeller Airports on county land. The county owns and operates the airport, receives lease payments from Propeller for the land, and receives a share of revenue from the terminal’s operation.

Propeller’s CEO, Brett Smith, has great ambitions for Paine even beyond the county’s master plan. He believes the airport is positioned to transform into a “best-in-class” example of a multi-use ecosystem, providing additional quality jobs, smart growth, and improved quality of life for the community.

From a commercial service perspective, he is confident Alaska will continue to rebuild to pre-pandemic levels and expects to attract other airlines as local travelers clamor for more destinations. Paine could play a bigger role in meeting future air-travel demand, Smith says, but he is skeptical of the state’s air-transportation efforts.

He calls the state’s current aviation working group “a good example of government wasting people’s time and money. We should be focused on what we have and making it work.” For example, he believes that the county is right to push for a light-rail station at the airport. This would boost ridership and develop infrastructure that would truly benefit regional transportation.

“This airport has a ton of potential and a really good foundation from which to grow, and I am honored to be a part of it.”

Aviation analyst Scott Hamilton said Snohomish County started out too modestly with the two-gate terminal in 2019. It was never going to capture many business travelers with limited destinations and frequency of flights.

“The Paine Field service should have, from the get-go, been a 10-gate facility that could serve 100 flights. This would provide frequency, broaden the cities served, and more likely ensure success,” Hamilton wrote in 2018 as the airport was about to open.

He feels the same today and sees little potential for growth with the current facility constraints.

“I think Alaska [Airlines] has its presence as a blocking action against even the slightest incursion by a competitor,” he wrote in an email. “But in the scheme of things, operating from two gates to a number of destinations with one or two flights a day does not make sense to me. These routes will be leisure traffic, where business schedule convenience does not matter.”

Enlarging the terminal and adding more business destinations is essential, he believes.

“Unless and until Sno County pursues an aggressive airport development program (which would add thousands of jobs, by the way) that dramatically expanded the terminal, Paine won’t be much of an airport for airline service—and Alaska won’t feel the need to be competitive with any other airline or airport,” Hamilton wrote.

What’s more, many residents near the airport remain opposed to adding more airline service. Communities are raising concerns about air and noise pollution, and they worry that more passenger operations will jeopardize Boeing, other aerospace manufacturing businesses and general aviation, said Mukilteo resident Mike Moore, president of a local advocacy group, Save Our Communities. “If you get your noise under the tent, you’ll just expand, expand, expand,” Moore said.

While there may be a need to find capacity to relieve Sea-Tac congestion, “that does not mean Paine Field should push to maximize expansion plans to serve that role which would significantly increase costs to surrounding communities and potentially lead to a reduction of the main economic driver at Paine Field—aerospace manufacturing,” Moore wrote in comments submitted to the county.

Meanwhile, 40 miles to the south, Sea-Tac Airport is on a pace to equal or exceed the record passenger volume set in 2019. This year flights were added to Beijing and Chongqing in China, to Munich and Toronto, and this fall to Manila.

Several major capital projects are underway at Sea-Tac to improve the customer experience in the cramped main terminal. The biggest projects are Alaska’s major overhaul of its north-end ticketing space and the construction of a new checkpoint at the south end, taking over part of the Gina Marie Lindsey Arrivals Hall.

But all this work adds no additional gates for parking aircraft and handling passengers.

The airport’s Sustainable Airport Master Plan identifies 30 “near-term” projects to accommodate more passengers and flights. In 2018 before the pandemic, the Port’s environmental document said the airport would be unable to handle an expected 56 million passengers in 2027. In 2023, the airport reached 50.9 million passengers.

The largest and most controversial element is a new passenger terminal to the north, with 19 new aircraft gates. Planning documents say the near-term projects will accommodate 56 million passengers and will be complete or under construction by 2032. The environmental effort, however, has been delayed several times in recent years.

The draft federal Environmental Assessment is now slated for completion later this year, to be followed by a state environmental review, which must be finished before the Seattle Port Commission can act on the projects. Lawsuits to block the projects are expected from some neighboring cities and community organizations.

In Olympia, the search for longer-term solutions to the state’s looming air-transportation crunch is getting off to a slow start. The Commercial Aviation Work Group, created by the Legislature in 2023 after the collapse of an earlier airport-siting commission, had its first meeting in July.

The work group has a broad mandate to “evaluate the long-range commercial aviation and transportation needs of the state, including alternatives for additional aviation capacity which includes expanding use of existing airports and multi-modal opportunities,” perhaps including light-rail connections.  The group will make recommendations on solutions to the Legislature, but not recommend sites for a new airport. There is no deadline for final recommendations.

The governor has yet to appoint eight of the group’s 19 members, including representatives of airlines and environmental organizations.

Ann Richart, WSDOT’s Aviation Director, acknowledges the group faces several challenges, among them overcoming the skepticism of Thurston and Pierce County residents who fought the siting-commission’s choice of potential airport sites in their communities.

The work group’s real task, she said, is to look far into the future for innovative transportation solutions. “If we are going to build a new airport, it is going to take 30 years. Aviation technology and airlines are going to change a lot. I think part of our work should be to forecast what the system will be like in 30 years,” she said.

The job could take three years or more, she said, and will depend on the Legislature’s willingness to fund potentially costly consultants and studies.

“I may be hopelessly naïve,” she said. “But having this broad coalition, we can come up with solutions that use innovative technology and achieve liveability, social and environmental justice.”

For Oris Dunham, a former Sea-Tac and LAX airport director, the pace of development at Sea-Tac and the work of the state all point to the need to focus on building capacity at Paine Field.

“The opportunity is great for commercial activity at Paine,” said Dunham, with the growth of the North Sound. He cites the example of another satellite airport, Ontario Airport, which was initially slow to grow but is today California’s fast-growing airport.

“As things get more and more congested, people will go up there,” he said. “And if Alaska starts doing well, others will follow.”