AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2015 - 14

WAYPOINTS

On level ground

BY THOMAS B. HAINES
Editor in Chief

Airports are a bright spot in GA

Editor in Chief TOM
HAINES has taken

off and landed GA
airplanes at airports
in 46 states. You
others, look out.
He's on his way.

14 | AOPA PILOT August 2015

THINKING OF the three As of general aviation, Airports is
the one that shines the brightest. As I've reported over
the past couple of months, Aviators and Aircraft have
challenges that will require effort by all of us to overcome. The pilot population troubles and the aging fleet
problem have no simple or singular solutions. Neither
of those matter if we don't have places from which to
take off or land. We are blessed with a multitude of landing facilities in the United States-more than 19,000 on
the charts and thousands more that exist off the grid.
While the pilot population has been in a serious
downward trend for three decades and the GA fleet
is aging quickly, the number of landing facilities has
remained surprisingly stable, especially in the past
decade or so. In 2003, for example, we had 19,581
landing facilities, according to the FAA. At the end of
2014, that number was 19,360; of those, 14,212 were privately owned, private use. The remainder-5,148-were
either publicly owned, public use or privately owned,
public use. The percentage of public-use airports has
remained consistent-38 percent.
And while losing even one landing facility is troubling-because especially near urban areas we will
never get it back-given all of the other declining factors surrounding general aviation, the steady number
of landing facilities is encouraging.
There was a time in the late 1980s when we were
losing about one airport a week to development, poor
planning, or neglect. Today it's less than half that. In
some years over the past decade, we've seen an actual
increase in the number of airports.
Credit goes to AOPA and the FAA for consistent work over the decades to reduce the declines by
encouraging communities to do a better job of urban
planning around airports and for holding communities
to their federal grant obligations instead of allowing
closures. AOPA launched its Airport Support Network
in 1997 and today has some 2,500 volunteers at public-use airports helping to fend off problems and build
community relations that support the facility. We need
more, though. Here's your chance to give back to GA.
Of course, there have been high-profile losses over
the years. Meigs Field in Chicago was bulldozed in
the middle of the night by Mayor Richard Daley after
he spent a decade plotting the airport's demise, strategically allowing federal grant obligations to expire
and moving ownership of the facility to the parks

authority, one step removed from direct city government oversight-giving the mayor yet more cover from
prosecution. Ohio's Blue Ash and California's Rialto
are two others that come to mind-cases in which
communities made up their minds that they didn't
want or need the airports. Once that happens, it is
difficult to sustain a facility, even if it has federal obligations. The current poster child is California's Santa
Monica, where the city government has done an atrocious job of protecting the national asset that is Santa
Monica Municipal Airport. AOPA and others have
spent decades battling to keep the field open, and it
isn't over yet. Even today, the city council continues
to squander taxpayer dollars attempting to close or
stifle the federally obligated airport.
So while a few doozies come to mind, they are the
exception rather than the norm. Day in and day out,
America's airports soldier on as the on and off ramps
to the nation's aviation network. They create jobs and
economic growth, provide open space and recreation,
and daily provide starting and ending places for important missions moving everything from emergency
supplies in times of crisis to organs for transplant,
medevac patients, ag operations, and even moving pets
from foster to forever homes.
Every once in a while we get a win that is downright gleeful, such as the one at New Jersey's
Solberg-Hunterdon Airport. For years Readington
Township had tried to close or take over the 75-yearold family-owned, public-use facility. The township
even tried to use eminent domain. The court battles
have cost the airport owners plenty, but this spring
a judge wrote a precedent-setting ruling that found
in favor of the family and then criticized the government's efforts, calling them "un-forthright, evasive,
untrustworthy, argumentative, lacking credibility
and therefore unworthy of belief." Thank you, Judge
Paul Armstrong, for protecting this little patch of
Americana for future generations.
With frequent use and constant advocacy by all of
us, we can enlighten communities about the value of
our airports and their importance to the nation's transportation system.
AOPA
EMAIL thomas.haines@aopa.org

SOCIAL

Follow on twitter@tomhaines29

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2015