I appreciate your win, and should defer to your experience, but in my mind a hard-fought local win is just one battle. There are over 5000 public airports in the US. Fighting each battle one at a time may be necessary in the interim, but is likely to eventually result in many losses, which will build momentum for turning nearby airports towards fees in order to reduce traffic spillover. My sense is that the only win that is likely to be durable and widespread is top-down. Having to relitigate landing fees at even one local airport every few years, is a losing proposition in many metro areas. Eventually the neighborhood complainers will outnumber the pilots and we'll be overruled. I don't know how your local climate differs from what I've seen in CA and CO, but we need a powerful ally to win this fight. Arguably a national one, willing to make a hard-to-reverse national law or directive. If AOPA can get congress to pass Basicmed, there's hope.
I did, I guess I misunderstood the outcome and it makes more sense when re-reading. It does underscore that local government wishes are powerful, and if they're not on your side it's going to be a problem. I'm approaching this from the perspective that the local governments are not on our side. Maybe in some cases they are, but in many prominent cases they are not. If there's no way to preempt that, we will lose every time.
I just got done with a local (and successful) battle against Big Guvment protecting my private strip from a powerline coming through.
The airports with the landing fees will be the ones where the pilots are outnumbered 100:1 or worse. I'm witnessing it because I live in one of those places. The goal is to make flights rare, and ultimately maybe get it all closed down. I'd be willing to bet the battles I'm seeing are different than your local airports, and you can't reason with a city council that wants the place shuttered so they can sell it off to real estate developers. Explosive suburban growth demands sacrifice and GA has the smallest voice at the table.
Follow the money trail.
Money talks. A bunch of small time GA pilots can't compete with the hundreds of millions at stake for real estate developers. The process is corrupt from the start because the voices for and the voices against don't have equal standing.
Your local experience makes sense to me, but I don't know how much a private strip in Texas has in common with a Santa Monica, Torrence, or Boulder situation where the general public and elected officials are becoming hostile to all airport activity with a special hate for piston GA and flight training traffic. It's irrational and you can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I respect your opinion but I think the circumstances we're talking about are not similar at all. This is way beyond small town politics where I live. The pilot community is engaged, but the opposition is stronger and better connected as far as I can tell. If state or federal regulation doesn't make landing fees impossible, they will use landing fees to cut traffic until they can snuff the airport out. Maybe not this year or next year, but within 10 years.
Patrick from FlySto doesn't agree. It is a nice reference tool and I continue using it but it does have its flaws and limitations that an insurance company would exploit to give us higher rates!
I recall a case from a few years back, Colorado I think, where one person had a boatload of noise complaints. So the local pilots got together and filed a notice on the person's property (like what would have to be disclosed to buyers if, e.g., the house was near a dump or sewage treatment plant, etc.), thereby dramatically lowering the value of the property.
And there was no way they could argue it, because the homeowner himself was the one who filed all the noise complaints!
Thanks Marc for whipping that up! Obviously a high value effort.
I brought this up at our last St. Augustine Airport Pilot's Association meeting. We talked about if it comes up for public comment, we will flood the meeting with our negative comments. Sitting at the meeting was one of the current airport board commissioners and one of the candidates running for the board this year. Boy they heard how displeased us local voting citizens are about this possibility. We wanted them to know how we feel, before they even think about implementing something like this.
Completely disagree with everything stated here. all that is needed is an onboard radio. Not many batteries that can power a transponder for any reasonable length of time.
I personally go out of my way to do this
Don’t disagree Dan. “Attack” was a poor choice of words. I also don’t want to make a problem where it doesn’t exist, or give anybody any ideas that would otherwise be clueless. I will be vigilant and rely on diplomacy should it be required. . So far, so good…
