AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2013 - 87

P&E

DOGFIGHT: TOWER OR NO TOWER
Uh, oh. Senior Editor Dave Hirschman takes on his boss—Editor in Chief Tom Haines—in this discussion on which
is the better airstrip: one with an air traffic control tower or one without.

No more mayhem

The life for me

Why I welcome control towers

Keep your tower, just give me that countryside

B Y D AV E H I R S C H M A N

BY THOMAS B. HAINES

THE TRAFFIC PATTERN at my formerly nontowered home airport
used to resemble a game of chicken. VFR departures would find
themselves beak-to-beak with pilots practicing ILS approaches
under the hood in the opposite direction; corporate jets had to
find gaps between students practicing touch-and-goes and simulated engine-out landings; and helicopters, gyrocopters, and gliders
added to the anarchy in their own unique ways. Now, an FAA contract tower has gone up at Frederick Municipal Airport, and the
new sheriffs have made order of previous chaos.
IFR flying is greatly simplified. Departure clearances are more
quickly relayed via an airport ground control frequency (instead of
a remote link to Potomac Clearance). Controllers cancel IFR flight
plans upon landing, which avoids the tricky two-step of cancelling
IFR by radio at low altitude, on final
approach, and sometimes barely
clear of the clouds—all while trying
to listen for traffic on the CTAF.
But the most surprising aspect
of the new tower is how much better things work on VFR days. Instead
of shoehorning all VFR arrivals into
a single pattern (often stretched out
to ridiculous proportions), ATC now
DAVE HIRSCHMAN
splits arrivals into two streams: leftand right-downwind, depending on the direction the airplanes are
coming from. Before the tower, CFIs were concerned their students
wouldn’t be able to get enough takeoff and landing practice. But
the availability of both left- and right-hand patterns gives students
more repetitions in the same amount of time, and helps them get
comfortable flying circuits in both directions. Even better from a
student perspective is the real-world ATC experience they gain
on every flight.
My AOPA colleagues and I had worried that the tower would
make some of our aerial photography assignments more difficult to accomplish at our home field. Happily, tower controllers
greatly simplify formation departures and arrivals, and they happily accommodate the multiple low approaches we sometimes
require. If you give the controllers a quick preflight telephone call
to let them know what you’d like to do (or maybe a box of doughnuts if your request is extravagant), they’ll just about always say yes.
Best of all, the controllers have shown they have a sense
of humor. When the pilot of a passing hot air balloon jokingly
requested permission to buzz the tower one evening, the tower
controller responded with this old Top Gun gem.
“Negative, Ghost Rider,” she replied. “The pattern is full.” AOPA

TOWERED GA AIRPORTS have their place, but as infrequently as
possible in my flight plans. It seems as if towers are a magnet for
higher costs, a longer taxi, and a lot of hoopla.
Two examples: Many of my trips are up and down the East
Coast. En route to Florida, I frequently stop for fuel in South
Carolina. Florence is a terrific towered airport with an efficient line
crew that I’ve visited many times over the years, but the sprawling
airport has long taxi distances and posted fuel prices $1 a gallon
more than Marion County Airport, a nontowered airport just 19 nm
away. On a January trip I stopped at Marion County both directions
because fuel was just $4.52 a gallon—the least expensive I could
find anywhere in the region, and by a significant margin. Avgas
at $4.50 isn’t a bargain, but in a relative sense it is. The price has
recently gone up, but the FBO maintains a similar price delta to other
larger airports nearby. Marion County
has no parallel taxiway, but it’s not a
concern because traffic is so light
that I’ve never had to wait for landing traffic in order to backtaxi to the
departure end of the field.
An alternative stop is a bit farther
south at Hilton Head, a towered airTOM HAINES
port with competing FBOs, so you’d
think you might get a break on the fuel prices. But no. The cheapest fuel at Hilton Head as of mid-February was $7.37, not including
various fees if you don’t take on enough go-juice. Or, you could stop
12 nm away at Beaufort County Airport and top off for $6.10 a gallon full service; fill it yourself and save another 15 cents a gallon.
Like Marion County, Beaufort is a sleepy little single-runway field
without a lot of additional services, but for me it always brings back
memories of a family trip—a first long trip with our two then-little
girls on board. We brought a picnic lunch and ate next to a palm
tree—the first palm tree my girls had ever seen. Sure, Hilton Head
is closer to the golf courses, and the FBOs gleam with marble and
stainless, but when I’m just passing through I just feel like I’m in
the way of the heavy iron at places like that.
There are plenty of other reasons to love small, nontowered
airports where you can saunter up to airplanes and peek in the windows to compare avionics stacks, slip quickly in and out with only
a couple of calls on the CTAF, and debate with the locals whether
your pattern entry was “right” or not. At a towered airport, the guy
(or gal) in the cab decides that for you. I learned to fly at a small
nontowered airport and for me, all these decades later, that still
feels about right. See you around the field.
AOPA

EMAIL dave.hirschman@aopa.org

EMAIL thomas.haines@aopa.org

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - October 2013

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