Noisy protest calls out limits on airlifts to Seattle Children's
Protesters gathered near Seattle Children's hospital on Saturday to call for all pediatric emergency helicopters to be allowed to land directly at the hospital.
The protest is the latest ripple in the ongoing saga surrounding the hospital, the Laurelhurst Community Council and the city. The outrage had been sparked about a week earlier when a series of social media posts went viral, calling out a decades-old policy that only allows critically ill or injured" children to be helicoptered to the hospital.
In 2025, it meant 73 out of 222 airlifts landed at the Graves Field helipad about a mile to the southwest, where an ambulance then took the patient to the hospital - a transfer that delays care for sick and injured children.
A medical review committee analyzes each helicopter flight to determine if it meets the criteria for urgency. If it finds an excess in less-urgent flights, the Department of Construction and Land Use can suspend a conditional use permit. The policy stemmed from the early 1990s when residents made noise and safety complaints.
About 50 people gathered Saturday at Sand Point Way and Northeast 45th Street, blaring vuvuzelas and noisemakers through one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods.
While the city, hospital and Community Council said Friday that they support the removal of the review committee, a local activist who helped organize the protest, Zoe Mason, was skeptical.
"We're aware on Friday that Seattle Children's hospital put out a statement that LCC has agreed to back them in the City Council," Mason said. "However, no actual change was signed. There is nothing in writing that all helicopters will be able to land. We don't know what that agreement will actually look like or whether (the Laurelhurst council) will follow through."
The Community Council was slated to meet on Monday but postponed the meeting, according to its website.
Madison Callaghan, a Seattle resident, had helped spread word of the conflict through a TikTok video - and it caught fire online, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes.
"That was way more attention than I ever expected it to get," she said in a phone interview Sunday.
Callaghan recently worked as a lab scientist at a critical access facility in Montana, where she helped stabilize patients and fly them out, she said. There, she often worked with air medical transport services.
In Seattle, she said, "this issue seems like one that we can actually make a difference with.
Seattle Times staff photographer Ivy Ceballo contributed to this story.
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This story was originally published May 9, 2026 at 11:33 PM.