"Peter Duniho" wrote in message ...
"Nasir" wrote in message
. com...
[...]
Georgetown airport needs a control tower. It is long over due!!! The
traffic
is hectic... This accident could have been prevented if we had a tower. We
all need to educate the city council before we have a worst tragedy.

Sounds like it also could have been prevented if the Extra pilot had looked
out for traffic already on final. The guy who wrote that account should
probably be informed that number of operations is what affects whether a
control tower is at an airport or not, rather than number of accidents.

Pete

The pilot that gave the first hand report knows that the number of
operations determines whether the airport can get a control tower.
GTU is estimated to have 100,000 take off and landings a year. (As
reported in the local paper.)
The FAA agreed to fund 50% of the tower in 2001. The pilots wanted
the tower to improve safety at the airport. The people who live near
the airport did not want the tower to be built because they thought it
would cause the airport to expand even more than it has. Because two
local airports (about 20 miles away) were shutdown, GTU has grown
faster then expected.
The anti airport people in the area would like to have the airport
closed. Since the decision to not build the tower in 2001, the
airshow was canceled after a Stearman crashed into a house during the
airshow in 2002. Since then, there has been a twin that landed in the
houses north of the airport. That was
in July of 2003. (The NTSB prel doesn't even get the location of the
accident correct.) In April of this year, a plane had to land on the
frontage road of I-35 near the airport, fortunately no one was hurt.
Now this.
One city official stated on TV that the FAA will now do a 90%
funded control tower at the airport.
GTU now has three flight training schools, teaching private,
instrument, commercial, multiengine, flight instructor, and
helicopters. In addition, it has a number of turbo prop and jets
based out of there. Add to that the army doing practice approaches,
formation flying, and some acrobatics based out of there. That means
that you have new students who think there is only one way to fly a
pattern, a large number of instrument students flying approaches and
the normal number of pilots with attitudes and lack of situational
awareness. For example, it is not a good idea to do a midfield
crossing into the pattern when another plane is doing an instrument
approach that will probably end in a missed approach procedure. It is
not a good idea to practice hovering upwind from the favored runway.
It is not a good idea to land on 11 when everyone else is landing on
18. So yes, in some ways GTU was an accident waiting to happen, and
it has.
It is fine to say that people should have been using their radios
and should have been looking for the other planes. But, until you
have been there, being a Monday quarterback is always easy and it is
easy to blame someone you don't know. I've heard it on these
newsgroups, with people assuming that only inexperienced pilots will
use the rudder to try to turn the plane on base to final. Pilots have
to learn that these things can happen to experienced pilots as well as
inexperienced pilots. I can't make any comments about what was done
correctly or incorrectly in this situation, because I wasn't there,
and like the rest of you, I don't know all of the details.
So, for those of you that do not fly out of the GTU airport, you
have the luxury of arguing that the building of control towers are a
function of the number of ops, not the number of accidents. You have
the luxury of arguing about the merits of radio calls vs. see and
avoid. You have the luxury of arguing about how to enter the traffic
pattern. You have the luxury of arguing about whether a towered
airport is safer than a nontowered airport. Unfortunately the pilots
at GTU no longer have that luxury. They have to figure out how to
have a safe airport amidst a growing group of citizens that would like
to shut down the airport.

Hobbes

The interesting thing about planes you don't see is that you don't
really know how many of them you haven't seen.