Last week, the Seattle subreddit dredged up a long-time drama between the Laurelhurst neighborhood and Seattle Children’s Hospital about its helicopters.
Seattle Children’s is the go-to specialized pediatric care center for Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. When children from near and far away need urgent treatment, they’ll get swooped up by a helicopter and taken to Seattle Children’s. This, the affluent North Seattle neighborhood will tell you, is quite the nuisance.
Such a nuisance that a neighborhood group wanted to make sure the hospital wasn’t landing flights on the helipad for non-emergency reasons, according to meeting minutes from 2021. “There needs to be a medical justification form for each flight (one was a broken leg for example),” said one member. In the six years of documented meetings The Stranger looked at, they had a lot more to say.
That group is the Laurelhurst Community Council (LCC), a group of five board members (many who are retired from their careers), that has been representing neighbors’ interests for decades, interests that include fighting with Seattle Children’s.
The LCC cyclically opposes hospital expansions—they did so in the 1980s and again in the mid-2000s. They’ve mandated parking limits on hospital workers and staff, inspiring a culture of carpools and shuttles. And, since the 1980s, they’ve warred against the scourge of noisy helicopters carrying ill children.
The city didn’t fully approve the construction of the hospital’s helipad for eight years. Seattle Children’s only had a conditional-use permit to land helicopters while legal battles and environmental reviews waged on. Seattle only granted Seattle Children’s formal approval for its helipad in 1992. The floodgates opened.
John McFalls, a Laurelhurst resident, wrote a 1992 letter to the editor of the Seattle Times where he wrote the neighborhood would be safer and quieter if the helicopters landed on a helipad at the University of Washington. “No persuasive evidence has been offered to demonstrate the need for a helipad in our immediate neighborhood,” he concluded.
Dr. Paula Lozano, who was in her last year of pediatric residency and freshly post-partum with her first baby, wrote a rebuttal to McFalls, titled “Children’s Hospital—Opposition To Helipad Flagrant Case Of Nimbyism.” She explained that most flights already landed at the UW site. Those patients could survive the transfer to an ambulance and the nearly-10 minute journey to Seattle Children’s. Many cases cannot. (Plus, an extra ambulance ride adds up. In 2025, taking an American Medical Response ambulance in Seattle cost $950 per transport plus $15 for every mile traveled.)
Lozano wrote, “I would urge Laurelhurst residents who feel harassed by these helicopter landings to ask themselves: If YOUR baby was born two months premature in Wenatchee, or if YOUR 7-year-old daughter had a prolonged seizure in Bellingham, or if YOUR teenage son collapsed and became unresponsive at basketball practice in Renton, or if YOUR 2-year-old had severe wheezing and turned blue in Issaquah, would YOU want the helicopter to land 10 minutes away from Children’s Hospital?”
When the LCC made a stink on behalf of the neighborhood, the hospital entered into a voluntary agreement with Laurelhurst to land only the most serious cases at the hospital and to land the rest 1.2 miles away, at the University of Washington’s Graves Field. Representatives from the hospital, the Laurelhurst Community Council, Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, and Public Health—Seattle & King County meet twice a year to talk about the landings. The Stranger requested a copy of this agreement from Seattle Children’s and the Department of Neighborhoods and neither could provide it.
According to a statement from Seattle Children’s, “ongoing efforts by some to restrict helipad access puts an unnecessary burden on the system.” Due to that voluntary agreement, “Children’s receives three or fewer helicopter transports per week and nearly all are admitted to an intensive care unit.”
The rebuttal writer became a general pediatrician. Lozano, now 62, is a senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. She says she would have worded her letter differently today, but her sentiment remained the same.
“It struck me that the use of the [Seattle Children’s] helipad should ‘only be when necessary,’” Lozano says, “But we had a lot of kids who were really, really sick.”
Lozano had heard quite a bit about the LCC back when she was a resident at Seattle Children’s. She doesn’t think the agreement the hospital and the neighborhood have about helicopter landings is normal. Most children’s hospitals and academic medical centers are in poorer urban areas, she says. “They don’t complain that much about helipads and ambulances and that sort of thing,” she says. “It’s when you have a more affluent neighborhood that you end up having these kinds of complaints.
Laurelhurst, while technically a city neighborhood, feels suburban and is one of the wealthiest areas in the city. Census data pegs the annual median income for the neighborhood at more than $250,000, and last election, they voted for Bruce Harrell.
Despite the 1992 agreement, this issue keeps coming up.
When the Laurelhurst Community Council (then known as the Laurelhurst Community Club) tried to fight an expansion at the hospital in 2009, a Stranger report cited “the community club’s successful efforts to reduce medevac helicopter trips to and from Children’s Hospital” as an example of the group’s might. The director of the club back then told The Stranger that “the helipad at Children’s is half a block from an elementary school and ‘landing causes big gusts of wind and endangers the kids on the playfield.’”
At a Seattle Children’s Implementation Advisory Committee meeting in August 2020, the council president complained about noise from the helicopters, alleging helicopters were flying too close to homes.
Last week, a self-identified helicopter pilot posted a now-deleted thread on X about the landing restrictions at Seattle Children’s. Someone posted the details on Reddit, allowing the public to re-learn the power Laurelhurst wielded over the hospital and the sick kids it treats. The post exploded with outraged comments.
Hours later, the LCC’s website mysteriously went down for “maintenance” and has since been replaced with a public statement that says the LCC “is committed to advocating for the health and safety of the community, city, state and region. We highly value and appreciate the lifesaving care Seattle Children’s and first responders have provided patients for decades.”
Before it went down, we downloaded all of their meeting notes from the last six years, the farthest back they stretched.
In February 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, vice president Pat Chaney asserted that the agreements between the hospital and the neighborhood regarding helicopters “aren’t being followed currently,” according to the summary of the meeting. The council made Chaney the lead on the helicopter issue. At the next month’s meeting, Chaney presented data on helicopter landings that showed “a dramatic shift in locations where helicopters are landing,” with the majority landing at the hospital rather than the UW site. According to the meeting notes, which are not direct quotes, the council asked the emergency department director at Seattle Children’s about these landings and he said “every rooftop landing was justified.” During the April meeting, Chaney “expressed concern about neighbors being stressed by the noise and vibrations of helicopters landing so close to their houses.”
The group then discussed whether those patients landing on the roof really needed to land there. Helicopter landing data from the first half of 2021—during the same period those meetings took place—shows that the top three reasons for hospital helicopter landings were overdoses, respiratory distress, and diabetic ketoacidosis. Of the 72 landings in those six months, 26 were newborns, six were infants, and 12 were toddlers needing treatment.
Later that year, in an October 2021 meeting, a member of the neighborhood council mentioned that there are websites where you can track helicopter flights. The minutes mention that helicopter pilots landing at the site do not want their flights tracked, Chaney relayed to the group. But Chaney said she would request data on every flight.
At the November meeting, Chaney said she hasn’t heard from Seattle Children’s “about the validity of the flights from last month.” She said she wanted more information on each flight, like whether they’re all helicopters for the hospital, if the helicopters are doing required test runs, and what type of aircrafts are being flown. “In addition,” the meeting notes read, “there needs to be a medical justification form for each flight (one was a broken leg for example).”
This drama continued for years. Chaney reported back to the LCC in April 2022 that at the biannual meeting about helicopter flight data that March, “one of the external physicians appointed to the committee by SCH, launched an uniformed, vitriolic attack on the LCC representative, without intervention from SCH to curb the unprofessional behavior.” The minutes from the actual Medical Review Committee meeting are not publicly available.
At an October 2023 meeting, Chaney said she wanted to buy “the Flight Aware reports for flight tracking software.”
Their goal, it seemed, was to prove that the hospital’s flight data was inaccurate and the hospital was not complying with the agreement. Chaney and the LCC did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.
The cost of that was $650 for the whole year. Chaney made a motion that the LCC “pay a $1 consulting fee plus funding of the Flight Aware not to exceed $800.” The motion passed unanimously. They allocated another $500 for the software in 2024.
As of February 2026, the LCC was still trying to get someone—at the hospital, the county, the DOH, or the city—to review the helicopter landings and do something about them.
The LCC’s next community meeting is on May 11. Maybe the website will be back up by then.
This story has been updated since publication.
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