On 2006-04-12, roncachamp wrote:

Skylune wrote:

Capital costs would obviously depend upon the length of the runway,

At remote rural airstrips they tend to be rather short.

The remote rural airstrips that I've been to (in the United States) tend
to only be airstrips because someone stuck an airfield symbol on the
chart. All they are is a clearing in the trees and pretty much totally
unmaintained. The maintained ones are only maintained because they have
private owners who provide all the funding.

I've got some video online of three remote rural airstrips. The grass is
probably only short there because aircraft propellers have 'mowed' it
:-) - http://www.alioth.net/Video/BackCountry.mp4 (you may want VideoLAN
Client, which is free - http://www.videolan.org - if you don't have an
MPEG-4 player).

The point is remote rural airstrips tend to be privately funded.

And the state funded ones (such as Lower Loon, which I suspect is state
funded) are only funded because they are primarily there for state use -
so that the forestry guys can get access to remote mountainous areas,
and rescue crews have somewhere to land to pick up hikers/mountain
climbers who have hurt themselves. They'd be there if private GA used
them or not because the state needs them.

--
Dylan Smith, Port St Mary, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net