John Courte
Well Known Member
This is pretty niche/local, so if you don't ever plan on flying to/from KSMO, (but you should!), please disregard.
KSMO contracts with Vector Airport Systems to handle the landing fee system there. The way it works (as far as I know) is their cameras and other systems catch your tail number when you land, or any time you get a squawk code from the tower for landing and departing. The system assigns you a landing fee based on the weight of your aircraft based on matching its tail number to the gross weight in the TCDS.
You'd think because we have no TCDS for our planes, that they wouldn't be able to bill you because there's no publicly recorded information for your gross weight. You'd be wrong. They bill you. They just bill you based on a WAG for what someone thinks a typical piston single weighs, in my case 2500 lbs.
So when I called them to find out exactly how they were billing my landing fees, I was able to give them the proper gross weight of 1190 lbs, which reduced my account balance and future fees considerably. As onerous, burdensome, and annoying as landing fees at SMO are, I'm glad to finally be paying what I should be instead of extra. No need for the city to get a dime more than they absolutely should from a policy designed to squeeze aviation out of one of the coolest airports in the country.
Anyway, hope this helps someone.
KSMO contracts with Vector Airport Systems to handle the landing fee system there. The way it works (as far as I know) is their cameras and other systems catch your tail number when you land, or any time you get a squawk code from the tower for landing and departing. The system assigns you a landing fee based on the weight of your aircraft based on matching its tail number to the gross weight in the TCDS.
You'd think because we have no TCDS for our planes, that they wouldn't be able to bill you because there's no publicly recorded information for your gross weight. You'd be wrong. They bill you. They just bill you based on a WAG for what someone thinks a typical piston single weighs, in my case 2500 lbs.
So when I called them to find out exactly how they were billing my landing fees, I was able to give them the proper gross weight of 1190 lbs, which reduced my account balance and future fees considerably. As onerous, burdensome, and annoying as landing fees at SMO are, I'm glad to finally be paying what I should be instead of extra. No need for the city to get a dime more than they absolutely should from a policy designed to squeeze aviation out of one of the coolest airports in the country.
Anyway, hope this helps someone.
; the tower just sends Vector a list of daily arrivals and departures. I have flown into SMO many times in several corp jets and find it a great little airport and very convenient when needing to go into downtown L.A. It's too bad the city hates it so much.
