SEATTLE — Residents near Boeing Field, from Georgetown to the west and as far as Mercer Island to the east, were blitzed with long and extraordinarily loud jet engine noise late Tuesday night.
The culprit was Boeing, which broke a community noise curfew by running protracted engine runs on its new 777-9X at the north end of the airfield until after midnight.
That massive plane, which had its first flight at the end of January, has the largest jet engines ever built. For these on-the-ground tests, the engines were repeatedly run at full power for as long as 15 minutes at a time, over the course of three hours between 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.
Residents who might have gone outside expecting to see a low-level flyover by the Air Force or some giant plane would have seen nothing overhead despite noise that persisted far longer than it would for any jet coming in to land.
