Welcome Aboard

AOPA is the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. They are a 400,000+ member organization and I assure you, they are a force to be reckoned with. They fired their opening salvo this morning.

FAA 'Funding Crisis' Manufactured by the Administration and the Airlines, Claims World's Largest Aviation Organization

Let me quote.

"No matter what they do to improve capacity and efficiency in the sky, it won't fix a system in which the airlines schedule 50 aircraft onto a runway that can only handle 30."

Does that sound like anything you’ve read before ?

Regardless of your socioeconomic feelings or mine, a 100 airplane-an-hour airport can only handle 100 airplanes per hour. While we debate policy, the airplanes continue to circle in holding patterns waiting for a landing slot, clogging our airspace and needlessly decreasing safety margins.

Those of you not involved in aviation probably don’t have a true appreciation of just how important General Aviation is in America. It is what sets America apart from the rest of the aviation world. It is huge. It is robust. It is -- literally -- the envy of the world. No one else has anything like it.

Here’s another quote to mull over.

”And it is airline control of a future air traffic control and funding system that particularly upsets the nation's private pilots and aircraft owners. Various user fee proposals circulated through government circles
would create an airline-dominated board that would remove spending decisions from Congress.”


Bingo.

Welcome aboard AOPA. Glad to have you with us.

Don Brown
February 2, 2006

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