GA Airports_Gil WolinNov06 19/06/2012 11:26 Page 2
GA AIRPORTS
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interest in preserving, promoting and expanding airports. That’s one critical to the future of private aviation…and far more so than to the outlook for commercial flying. Why so? Commercial-service airports – which today number fewer than 380 – enjoy constituencies that General Aviation airports often lack: airline passengers, for example, and the commercial carriers themselves - plus the support-service providers and the hotels, restaurants and other businesses that tend to gravitate to commercial airports. Almost anybody, in any town, anywhere with one such commercial-service airport can tell you at least a little about it. This seems true whether it’s one of the bestknown in the nation or otherwise. General Aviation airports provide similar services to a broader strata of users, and often broader services and connections to all those other airports that aren’t among that approximately 380-commercial airports. For more than 4,600 locales, the General Aviation airport is the main, primary or only access to the nation’s air-transportation network, meaning in the main no airport, no skyway off-ramp or on-ramp.
PUBLIC BENEFIT Let’s not neglect the ‘public benefit’, a phrase 30 years ago that was strongly disputed by the White House Administration. Today the argument seems to never arise and the public benefit of General Aviation enjoys widespread acknowledgement – at least from a cadre of savvy public officials,
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if not the general public itself. General Aviation airports are centers of commerce for their communities – even those places that don’t readily recognize the economic impact because they know littleto-nothing about their local airport’s functions. According to the FAA’s report, General Aviation contributed $38.8 billion in economic output in 2009. Factor in manufacturing and visitor expenditures and General Aviation accounted for an economic contribution of $76.5 billion. Consider the many ways those benefits manifest themselves – and the fact that most of them require an airport at some point.
THE “IMPORTANT SOCIETAL NEEDS” GA SERVES General Aviation carries its definition well: It includes ‘all of aviation’ except military or commercial. That’s ‘all of aviation’ except two narrow specialties: flying goods and people for hire, and protecting the country’s security. Those General Aviation airports also support other public-service activities: law enforcement, aerial fire-fighting, agricultural functions, border control, emergency medical services, flight training, maritime security, time-sensitive air cargo services, non-scheduled charter services and, of course, business and personal travel. Only relatively few of those approximately 380 commercial service airports provide the full breadth of these services along with the many others left unmentioned. Interestingly, the size of the airports, traffic www.AvBuyer.com
level and runway length have less influence on what airports can provide than they do over what aircraft can use them. But thanks to the extreme variation in General Aviation aircraft, machines are available for almost any runway length – and in some cases, useable where no runways exist. As FAA’s report notes, “Having a welldeveloped system of General Aviation airports throughout the country supports commerce while also providing a safety net of airports to support emergency aircraft diversions when necessary due to mechanical problems, medical emergencies, deteriorating weather conditions or other unforeseen circumstances. The rationale for continued Federal involvement in the system is that these General Aviation airports assist communities and their residents in meeting the needs that would otherwise be too costly or impossible to provide.” You have to love a sentence like the second one in that preceding graph. An acknowledgement of the public value of General Aviation decades after the Reagan Administration sought to end a publicly sourced share of FAA funding on the basis that “aviation provided no public benefit” to the country. To help planners and airport managers, local municipalities and FAA staff, the report categorized General Aviation airports into one of four groups with various functions in all four. These are: • •
National, which number 84; Regional, numbering 467; Aircraft Index see Page 4
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