NPR discussion on NAS

On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:44:43 +0000, Neil Gould wrote:


Even then, I didn't get the impression that he
was using the term "GA" to refer to us spam can pilots, but to business
jet operations.

My opinion is that this is just a "divide and conquer" approach:

"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."


Another participant contributed the idea that the NAS is as much a part
of our nation's infrastructure as are roads and bridges, and should just
be paid for in the same manner as those aspects. From that perspective,
it's a matter of priorities, and anyone short of the village idiot could
see that the total cost of upgrading and maintaining the NAS is a drop
in the bucket compared to drains such as a war in Iraq that shouldn't
have been started in the first place.

It was a good point; not enough is said about the economic impact air
travel has on the US. It would be nice to have numbers for this. Anyone
have references?

[...]

Well, on this point we part ways. 1200s don't "blunder around" in the
airways or in Class A and usually not Class B. Certainly not to the
point where they are an impediment on the system.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "blunder". But a 1200 absolutely
can get in the way of airline and corporate GA operations, at least
around here. If I were to choose to practice spiral ascents and descents
around COL, for example, I could put a serious crimp in EWR outbound
traffic to the south (when the wind is blowing the right way).

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

My typical "practice area" is north of SAX. I'm always on advisories for
this, and they always warn me to keep a ceiling of 5000 to avoid the
incoming traffic passing SAX. I could ignore those warnings, or simply
not talk to them. And if I were to practice maneuvers above 5000, I'd be
a crimp again.

And this is outside the mode C ring!

I've no problem being a "good neighbor". And that includes being in touch
with ATC. Much of the benefit of this, though, goes to the neighbor. So
while I don't mind it, I do get annoyed when some representative of the
neighbor wants to charge me for this!


One interesting bit of the article for me was a rational defense of
hub-and-spoke. Was the speaker wrong?

See above. The only defendant of the hub system that I heard was the
airline rep, and his point was that it provided access to airline travel
from locations such as in Maine that couldn't support direct airport
operations. That is the same justification that created the
hub-and-spoke system. But, other participants and callers challenged
that notion on a number of bases; it just doesn't work in reality. I
thought the discussion touched on much of the rhetoric that we hear, and
debunked a lot of it.

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

- Andrew