Land and Hold Short

[Update: Boing Boing bought into the airlines' side on this and went even further, confusing airport development funds with ATC costs and somehow making it sound like 25% of the cost of each airline ticket subsidizes rich people in bizjets. To their credit, they ran a couple of follow-up corrections from readers. Thanks to Mark for the tip.]

In this speech, U.S. FAA administrator Marion C. Blakey defends a new, fee-based U.S. system on these grounds:

“Tell you what. If the FAA really wanted to kill GA, as our critics claim, we’d just sit back and do nothing. We’d leave the air traffic system just the way it is, and let congestion slowly squeeze them out.”

What pilots know (but the public doesn’t) is that we have procedures for handling every part of a flight without help from air traffic control (ATC), and that thousands of flights every day go from point A to point B without ever talking to an air traffic controller, just like car drivers can manage a four-way stop without the help of a traffic cop. We have rules for departing (landing traffic gets right of way for the runway), rules for enroute (different altitudes for different directions of flight), and rules for arrival (everyone joins a circuit or pattern and takes their turn to land). In the Canadian north, as Aviatrix can attest, we even manage IFR just fine without ATC help.

These rules work great, but they do require that everyone slow down and get in line, and that’s where ATC comes in. Sure, a 737 could slow down to (say) 180 knots, fly a wide pattern, and wait its turn to land, but the airline doesn’t want it to (gas is expensive, and passengers hate being late). When the weather goes down, the airlines don’t want their jets and commuter turboprops stacked 20 deep in a hold following the one-in/one-out rule for uncontrolled airports in IFR. They don’t want to have to slow down to near propeller speed in terminal airspace in VFR so that they can see and avoid other traffic reasonably.

Because of all that, we have a special system in place to help the big guys out. There are controllers at busier airports, terminal controllers, and enroute controllers to help them get in and out of airports faster, without having to get in line and wait (at least, not as much). Huge amounts of airspace are reserved so that only aircraft talking to ATC can use them, again, almost entirely for the benefit of the airlines.

Remember that the sky belongs to everyone, and all this special accommodation for the airlines this is a bit of a pain for us G.A. pilots (long waits for clearances around class B/C or long detours, etc.), but we can get used to it, just like drivers get used to bus lanes. And sometimes (rarely), we even get our own tower at airports with extremely heavy G.A. traffic, just to help things along. It really adds insult to injury, though, when airlines complain that G.A. is not paying its fair share of the cost of this system (even though we already pay a fuel tax on both sides of the border, and a small fee in Canada, to subsidize a system designed largely for the airlines’ benefit), and it’s even worse when organizations like Nav Canada or the FAA start acting as lobbyists for the airlines.

On the way home from Teterboro Airport after a March break family trip to New York City, after 2.6 flying hours mostly in IMC with light to moderate turbulence. My older daughter in the copilot seat whipped out her camera and took this shot on short final on the ILS 32 at Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier Airport.

We had been racing down the approach at 110 knots to get in ahead of an approaching level 2 cell (though we’d been through a few of those already), and tower turned the lights up to maximum to make sure we wouldn’t have to go missed. The airport was reporting RVR 4000 ft (in other words, you could see less than a mile forward on the runway), but the approach lights were bright enough that I made them out at 800 AGL and started to slow the plane. The runway itself popped into view at 600 AGL, and my daughter took this picture a bit after that.

As ominous as this looks, it would not count as anywhere near a low approach for an ILS. However, it’s worth mentioning that Ottawa was forecasting 3,000 ft ceilings and 5 miles visibility when we left Teterboro.

Recently, in the cold weather, my Warrior’s battery has barely managed one try starting the plane — any more, and it goes flat. Most recently, it happened after I’d just been flying 1.7 hours and tried to restart after a short fuel stop. I had to figure out whether the problem was the battery or the alternator (or regulator).

My 15 March (2007) editions of the Canada Flight Supplement (airport directory) and Canada Air Pilot (approach plates) just arrived in the mail, and they have a new look. Just before I started flying in 2002, the CFS had a green cover (I saw old copies lying around), then it switched to blue. Now we’re going to have to get used to grey with fancy gradients.

More seriously, Nav Canada sent a letter along with the new pubs promising significant changes beyond just the cover colours. I wonder what they have in store for us. Up-to-date information about landing fees? Better diagrams for airports without instrument approaches? We’ll have to see.