Restricting Glider Ops at Public Arpt.

(rjciii) wrote
The Southern Eagles Soaring made a formal complaint to the local FAA
FSDO in ATL concerning the LaGrange-Callaway airport(LGC)restricting
glider flying to weekends only and unwillingness to rent hangars to
club members....
The club has since tried every conceivable
way to educate the airport authority about our operations and convince
them that we do not constitute a hazard to other aviation activity at
LGC to no avail. Now it seems we can't convince the FAA of that,
either. Help!

You're not going to want to hear this, but I have only one thing to
tell you. Move to someplace where you're wanted. There's really no
other solution. In all likelihood, you're going to lose this fight.

It's a matter of federal regulation that publicly funded airports are
to be open to all users participating in recognized aeronautical
activities, without discrimination, subject to reasonable regulations
as necessary for safety. The definition of recognized aeronautical
activity is fairly broad; it includes soaring, ultralights of all
sorts, skydiving, and pretty much any aeronautical activity regulated
by the FAA in any way.

On this basis, I have seen many groups (and been part of one) that
have brought the FAA into the picture when airport management has
tried to drive the activity off the airport. In every case, the
eventual outcome was that the operation moved to another airport or
shut down within a few years at most.

I suspect this is because the airport managers that try to drive out
the glider pilots, ultralight pilots, and skydivers are basically
ignorant and authoritarian. The same kind of people dominate the FAA,
and are pretty much unwilling to really go to bat against their own
kind.

Therefore, while the FSDO folks can't openly support the airport
manager in a flat-out prohibition, they can allow him to make rules
'for safety' that will cripple the operation. It won't help that most
of them will not know a thing about gliders, and might actually
consider such prohibitions reasonable. Even if they do bring in a
token glider 'expert' - like the glider-rated inspector at our FSDO -
odds are he will (a) still be a typical fed and (b) won't be much of a
glider expert. Would you believe the only glider-rated inspector at
our home FSDO, the guy who does all the initial CFI rides in gliders,
has never trained a glider student, never flown glider XC, and has
less than 50 hours in gliders?

So basically, you can expect that the airport manager will be able to
make rules at will, and that the FAA will not stop him. That's just
the way it is. And don't count on any substantive help from SSA,
either.

The only real chance you have of winning the battle is political. You
need to win over the airport board and get them to rein in or replace
the airport manager. If you fail to do this, you will be gone from
the airport by the end of the decade. Count on it.

Michael