Seafair brings Blue Angels back to Seattle, but at what cost?

Seafair Weekend is coming again in Seattle, and with it come the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, a sextuplet of F/A-18 Hornets that will bedevil locals with otherworldly aerobatics in an annual show not to be missed.

As air shows go, the Blue Angels, which perform more than 50 demonstrations a year, put on one of the best. In an intricate aerial dance, the six planes (six in a show, plus a backup) fly upside down, loop back and forth, split up, come back together and generally go wild in the skies over Seattle.

Some of the maneuvers bring the planes so close together, you'd think they would collide. Luckily, the pilots are among the best in the Navy, and Navy pilots will tell you they're the best in the world (though Air Force pilots will probably have something else to say about that).

Most importantly, so long as you can find your way somewhere near Lake Washington during the weekend, you can watch the show for no cost (though there are grandstand seats that can be bought, and if you want the best view, a boat would help -- a decidedly expensive way to see the show, if you break it down).

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But while you don't have to buy a ticket to catch a glimpse of the Angels over Seattle, it's hardly free.

For starters, not everyone in Seattle is happy about the thunderous roar of military jets over the city. Military veterans with PTSD could experience some triggering from the show, and people have lodged complaints about the impact on dogs and other animals. Some people think it a grandiose display of military machismo.

We'll call those "soft costs."

And then there are the hard costs, not paid directly through admission, but paid for by U.S. taxpayers nonetheless, since we fund the U.S. Navy's budget, ultimately.

Three years ago, when I first looked at those costs, I had a hard time chasing down the right answers. Thankfully, an old story in the Duluth News Tribune set me in the right direction and later, the Blue Angels' public affairs officer confirmed the details, which I'll relate again here.

Each plane burned roughly 1,300 gallons of fuel during their standard 75-minute show. The Hornets burn Jet A fuel, which runs about $5.11 per gallon at Boeing Field these days -- an almost 40-cent drop from last year -- according to airnav.com.

That puts fuel costs for the six planes that fly in the show at a combined $39,858 per day, and since they'll perform three days during Seafair, those days will run up a fuel bill of almost $120,000 -- not including the price of one practice day.

But that's not even close to the whole cost of the show.

To get at that, you have to head over to the U.S. Navy's budget, where, last year, you would have found some very confusing figures. Included as part of the recruiting and advertising operation and maintenance portion of the budget, the Blue Angels accounted for $34,379,000 two years ago but oddly get a zero in one section last year at this time. This is due to a line item consolidation, and digging around, you will (or I did, in this case) find some other numbers that put the baseline budget at $35,577,000.

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That figure is very close to what I came up with three years ago, so from there, I'll just carry my previous calculations breaking down the number of shows (59 in 2018) and the standard number of practice days (46), to come up with a per-demonstration cost of $603,000. Since the Angels will do three days in Seattle this year, the Seafair Weekend performances come in at a cool $1.8 million, all told.

You might not have to pay to see the show, but you're paying for the show -- whether you enjoy it or not.