Most of aviation is federally regulated, including airspace. Without federal pre-emption, condo associations would declare traffic patterns to be "trespassing" and sue local airports or their users out of existence.
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.Chris, again, voice of experience here. I have fought that specific battle, acting as local organizer, EAA member, and AOPA ASN. Approximately 200 pilots, local and distant, filed the appropriate documents with the FAA, one for each of seven power poles, over 1400 total. In due course we got an FAA ruling of "hazard to navigation". The alphabets, who had done nothing, took credit...and then disappeared.
View attachment 70869
Big win? Nope, because the FAA position was "Here's our ruling. Enforcement is the responsibility of the airport sponsor". It's their interpretation of the sponsor and grant agreements.
So, in the end, it all came back to five city councilmen and a mayor. Alabama Power didn't want to take the poles down (they went ahead and built them while the Feds were considering the matter), so they offered to install new street lights in Wetumpka, gratis. Town of Millbrook got new ballfield lights. Town of Elmore stuck with the pilots and got nothing. I don't remember what Elmore County got. Our new runway, previously supported by all of the above, was quietly removed from the airport master plan, and presto, no more airspace violation.
Federal enforcement would not be policy even if a rule prohibiting landing fees sprang into existence. And I will never, ever again depend on the FAA or the alphabets to protect my airport. Doing so was a strategic mistake; we could have stopped pole construction before they went up if we would have stayed local in the first place. Lesson learned.
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.Didn't read past the first paragraph?
I just got done with a local (and successful) battle against Big Guvment protecting my private strip from a powerline coming through.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.
EDIT: The only thing that seems to be preventing local, johhny-come-lately, cookie-cutter-condo residents from successfully suing flight schools and individual pilots is the designation of airspace as federally governed.
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.The airports with landing fees will be the ones where the locals gave up.
Follow the money trail.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.
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.Follow the money trail.
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 just got done with a local (and successful) battle against Big Guvment protecting my private strip from a powerline coming through.
Dan's right.
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.It's a chess game. I choose to play. You choose to forfeit. One of us will get landing fees.
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!All the flags are configurable, so it’s easy to adjust your IAS close to the ground - or the baro - flag to stop it flagging unnecessarily.
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!Luckily, seems only a handful of people complaining but most with many complaints. Looked like one had over 600 complaints and another over 200 in a short period of time. Even many per day.
Thanks Marc for whipping that up! Obviously a high value effort.I just added a usage fees field to Fly-Walk-Eat for each airport. I'll populate the data for all the airports charging usage fees that I know of, but this web page is crowd sourced, so please click on the edit button if you know of an airport fee that's not listed.
If the fee is simple (ie. $10 per landing), you can enter that just after the check box, else you can enter the URL pointing to the fee descriptions page for a particular airport. And worth clarifying ... I'm collecting airport usage fees (landing fees, touch and go fees, etc ...), not FBO specific fees. There are other sites for that.
And thanks to plehrke for the suggestion.
View attachment 70973
View attachment 70974
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.Good article, thanks Sam.
Note the matter is being decided at the local level, at every airport...mayors, city councils, airport advisory boards. Get busy now. Make friends in those circles so you have influence when the carpetbaggers show up in your town.
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.Literally everyone should have it, IMO. I think the regs requiring it in limited circumstance were a half measure that didn't go far enough for safety. There's no excuse for not having a transponder and radio in 2024 - they are easily battery powered. Tradition and expense aren't good enough reasons.
I personally go out of my way to do thisSomething else to think about is the number of privately owned airports that are barely getting by with basic services. I own a small public use airport in PA and the only income I get from transients is about $.50 a gallon for the fuel they buy. It takes a lot of 172s to pay for the cost of a fully EPA compliant fuel system, not to mention paved runway and ramps, night lighting, etc. Based airplanes cover the majority of those expenses with hangar rents, but they are barely enough.
In other words, you might think about frequenting small airports that really need your support. When I was starting out in aviation (53 years ago), there were 14,500 privately owned, public use airports. Over 10,000 of those have closed..........
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…Consider how professional lobbyists work. Attack mode is a last resort. A good lobbyist is a friendly face.