On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:53:42 +0000, Neil Gould wrote:

"Corporate GA has more money, so let's go after them. The little guys
won't complain about that. And after corporate GA is used to funding
the airlines, we'll hit the little guys. They don't have much, but that
just means that they cannot fund a PR campaign against us."

You could be right about the intentions of some who espouse that position,
but if I could glean a level of interest based on the respondents in this
broadcast, it didn't seem to get much traction.

I think most of the pilots here - at least amongst those that view
services like ATC and management of the nation's airspace as a government
function - recognize the divide and conquer strategy being applied.
Certainly AOPA does.

Well...some use the "camel nose in the tent" view, but it amounts to the
same thing in this case.

[...]

I'm sure that ATC would work around this...but that's "work".

Not that it couldn't or doesn't happen, but II would think that such
impositions would have a very small impact on 135 operations.

Around here, a fixed set of "gates" are used. It would be easy for those
gates to be "blocked" by VFR traffic. Then ATC needs to work around this.
It may have little impact on charter or airline operations, but it would
be more work for controllers.

It would be less work to avoid this by having that VFR target not be
there. That's a side effect of having us piston drivers IFR (or VFR with
advisories and willing to deviate on request).

That's all I wrote: that having use "talking" makes for less work for ATC.
Even just having a confirmed mode C is helpful.

[...]


But would dropping H&S further reduce air travel to those "smaller"
destinations? It does appear a reasonable possibility (from my
admittedly ignorant position).

Even the major airlines are putting more small jets into service. Most
of the commercial travel that we've done out of CLE in the last few
years have been on Embraers and 737s. For the really remote areas in
Maine, New Hampshire, etc. VLJs may play a larger roll. Expansion of
both of these should eliminate the need of H & S simply to service these
areas.

I share the hope that the "air taxi" concept will help serve these areas,
VLJs or whatever (isn't someone running a taxi service with Cirri?).
Perhaps that will kill the need for H&S.

Can the airlines do this? Or do they view air taxi operations as
competition?

I wonder what impact the shrinking of airline aircraft has on their costs.
I mean: is there some fixed per-flight cost which would define the
smallest aircraft they could "schedule"?

I cannot help notice that this push on the part of the airlines for
control over ATC and our airspace comes as a potential competitor is
possibly arriving. Coincidence? I wonder.

But does this mean that H&S was always flawed? Or did it make sense in
one environment, but not in the environment we hope is coming?

- Andrew