The destruction of a downtown airfield in Chicago illustrates the increasing discrimination against general aviation owners and operators
Chicago mayor Richard Daley's clandestine midnight demolition raid on the 55-year-old Meigs Field was nothing short of vandalism by an autocrat determined to shut the popular downtown airport by fair means or foul.
This is the final step in a protracted and often bitter battle with Meigs supporters spanning several years. In 1996 Daley did secure the temporary closure of this prime piece of real estate, but reopened it under threat of losing control of the lakeside airport. Although Meigs Field supporters secured an agreement to keep the airport in operation until at least 2006, legislation was never passed.
Legally, Daley could close Meigs and do whatever he wants with the city-owned site, which he plans to turn into a park. But his brazen disregard for the business and general aviation community cannot be condoned. The industry is understandably fearful of how the repercussions of Daley's action will manifest themselves. By justifying his methods as security driven - protecting Chicago from terrorists flying aircraft into the nearby skyscrapers - Daley has cleverly sought to appeal to heightened public sensitivities.
There are many GA airports, not only in the USA, that have fallen victim to "nimbyism" (not in my back yard), mainly due to aircraft noise. The public are all too willing to adopt the security argument to rid their communities of this perceived menace and local governments spend a lot of time and money to restrict access to business and general aviation aircraft. The National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) trade body, for example, estimates the city of Naples, Florida, spent about $1 million to ban around three Stage 2 aircraft movements a day, while other airports are threatening, illegally, to impose fines on tenants that operate during hours of voluntary curfew.
Sadly, the Meigs case will only serve to fan these flames of dissent and could prompt other city councils to consider similar drastic action against unpopular public-use airports.
Clearly opponents of these airports do not understand what business aviation is or does. They certainly do not appreciate its contribution to the economy. This ignorance, particularly in the higher echelons of power, has been heightened following 11 September. During recent US security crisis simulations, for example, senior officials simply shut down all business and general aviation operations due to a lack of information, rendering the industry impotent.
On top of this, the newly formed Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is continually impeding business aviation by imposing temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) over major cities, notably Washington DC, often at short notice. These effectively remove the two major benefits of business aircraft - convenience and flexibility.
But the industry is fighting back. The NBAA rightly argues that qualified business aviation operators should be granted the same access to airspace as scheduled carriers and have the same immunity from TFRs. This is to be achieved through a TSA-provided access certificate. The association wants the access certificate to become a national standard, which will make clear to state and local authorities that airspace and airport security is a national issue and not to be subject to local and unilateral action, as witnessed at Meigs Field last week.
The NBAA has a point. After all, business aircraft operators, unlike the airlines, know who their passengers are and, more importantly, why they are flying. But alarmingly, airlines are allowed to continue flying and given access to TFRs even as the threat level escalates. The anomaly doesn't end there. While airlines and airports share responsibility for security, business aircraft operators have to go it alone and are required to implement security measures whether the airport is an international gateway or a fenceless airfield.
The perceived threat of business aviation should be mitigated by these national security rules. However, with no legal security framework yet in place for general aviation, the picture is more unclear. Although representative trade bodies are urging owner/operators to be responsible it is almost impossible to define whether GA is a realistic security threat or not. A light aircraft cannot do much damage if flown into a building, but two recent high-profile cases in Florida and Milan, Italy, have done little to dampen these fears.
Yet until GA can turn around the perception that it is a security risk, and that task has to be considered monumental in comparison with the one facing business aviation, Richard Daley and others of a similar inclination will get away with bulldozing prime airfields.
Source: Flight International
