‘Fucking Blue Angels’

Much like Earthquake Twitter, few things band San Franciscans together like collectively bemoaning Fleet Week — especially its airshows.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in early October. Car alarms are going off. Glass panes quiver. Trinkets on shelves rattle. Dishware shakes amid wooden floors vibrating. Our dogs and cats (and even reptiles) grow bothered, taking respite underneath furniture (or inside their respective hide boxes). 

No, a Thursday like this doesn’t coincide with a seismic event; the USGS has no records of it. This day, October 7th, 2022, was the day the Blue Angels — a flight demonstration squadron of the United States Navy formed in 1946 — began flying over downtown San Francisco for Fleet Week.

Fucking Blue Angels.

— Matt Charnock (@M_J_Charnock) October 6, 2022

The collective consensus is that we all hated it.

San Francisco Fleet Week is now the largest of its kind anywhere in the country, its roots dating back to 1981 when then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein led the nation in celebrating America’s naval and airforce services. Since then, the Blue Angels have flown over San Francisco in dizzying fits of acrobatics during the annual event… bringing with them traumatic sonic booms. 

Measuring the sound of fighter planes flying over isn’t exactly straightforward; engine type, altitude, and even the fuel used all play a factor in measuring that figure. But based on estimates from Purdue University, a jet flyover at 1,000 feet, which is the elevation of Blue Angels, is 103 dB. To put that decibel reading into perspective: Yesterday’s Blue Angels flyovers were 100,000 times louder than the sound of a passing passenger car.

Exposed for more than 15 minutes and hearing damage can be sustained at such levels. However, the ramifications of this kind of sound go beyond injuring our eardrums. These sounds, specifically in this context, bring their own set of problems.

Much like loud bangs produced by fireworks, fighter jets can trigger survival instincts in certain animals — particularly avian fauna. Almost all species of non-predatory-bird perceive other flying objects as threats. This causes them to exert energy levels that they may or may not have to evade the identified threat. The sound from fighter jets, themself, can incite flight responses and disorientation in some species. 

In particular, Illinois University’s College of Life Science noted that researchers have found that birds will take flight en masse, traveling remarkably longer and higher than normal. In some cases, these flocks become so densely packed that they are detectable with weather radar. In more than one documented case, birds have flown so far out to sea after experiencing a disorienting event that they weren’t able to make the return trip; these birds, quite literally, fell from the sky and toward their deaths.

Waterfowl, like snow geese, have found that the time of food intake during the day may be reduced by up to 51% if they are disturbed. Brent geese have been observed spending 30% more time feeding compared with birds of the same species who haven’t experienced regular traumatic events — like, say, a fighter jet hurling through the sky around 150mph, burning 1,300 gallons of jet fuel per hour.

The booms from passing plans have been well-documented to trigger episodes of PTSD in returning veterans, political refugees, and people who have fled areas marked by violence. For a city with roughly 283,000 immigrant residents — a figure accounting for about  35% of the city’s entire population — it feels like it’s in incredibly poor taste to hold air shows under the guise of patriotism.

As for our dogs? Much like birds, loud sudden noises, like fireworks and jets flying over, can trigger their fight-or-flight responses. And just as with avian fauna, experiencing these elevated fight-or-flight responses can cause them to act irrationally; it is not uncommon for dogs to run away from home or become uncharacteristically aggregated amid episodes of fight-or-flight.

The Blue Angels represent a relic of San Francisco. When they first began circling our cities for Fleet Week, San Francisco’s fog was around 30% thicker, some 200,000 fewer people called the city home, and there were thousands of fewer cars in the city to spontaneously honk as their alarms went off.

We don’t need the Blue Angels to inundate our small city with the deafening roars of ignited fossil fuels. We never did. But in the current state of the world — and, by proxy, the environment and political climate — it’s unbecoming of San Francisco to continue holding these types of air shows. But it won’t stop; it’s tradition after all; this city’s perpetual tug-of-war between pushing society forward and holding on to antiquated practices remains taut.

What will it take for the Blue Angels to stop flying over our homes and fighting our dogs and scarring our children and setting off our car alarms? I’m not sure. In the meantime, I know (for certain) that I’ll keep on saying (and tweeting) “fucking Blue Angels” for a while.

Matt Charnock