Author: Paul Tomblin

Article in the paper

Schumer, Clinton see danger in curtailing hours at airport tower

The important bit:

“It’s not a huge deal. There’s 10 times as many uncontrolled airports as there are with control towers, so pilots are pretty used to flying without towers,” said Paul Tomblin of Greece, secretary of the Rochester Flying Club.

“There’s not a lot of traffic after midnight. I’ve been to Rochester in the middle of the night and the controllers sounded pretty bored,” Tomblin said.

alaska_cruise/DSCN1437

What the on-line edition spares you from is the horror of seeing the picture they illustrated the article with. It was basically this picture from our Alaska cruise, but cropped in a bit so you couldn’t see the PFD and spray skirt. Oh, the horror.

Hmmm. Picture doesn’t show on the first page of my blog, but does on the article page.

Expect penalty vectors

Remember how I said I have become the local media “go-to” guy for aviation stuff? Well, the same guy who called me about the Steve Fossett thing called me today to ask about the FAA’s proposal to close a bunch of towers after midnight on some of the less-busy airports.

When I read about this on AvFlash, I didn’t bother looking at the list of airports, but I assumed Rochester was going to be one of them. The airport is nearly dead at night, except for the occassional frieght dog in an AzTruck and the FedEx jet. So when this guy called, I said “No big deal”, only much wordier than that. I said there are ten times as many non-towered airports as towered airports out there, so pilots know how to handle the lack of a control tower just fine. (Actually, come to think of it, there are probably 100 times as many. I should look that up on the AOPA web site. Ok, not bad. According to the “GA (General Aviation) Serving America” web site, there are 5200 public use airports, 550 served by airlines, so my factor of ten is probably not too far off.)

However, saying “no big deal” to a tower closure, even a part-time closure, is not going to endear me to the members of the air traffic controllers union. I guess I’d better not let anybody in the air traffic controllers union know who I am on the radio for a while, lest they re-route me via Timbuktu.

Sure, I’d use it more often, if…

…it weren’t a soul and productivity destroying piece of shit.

My boss is always nagging the developers to do more documentation, and to put them into the “documenation blog” (which actually has some blog-like features, but it’s mostly a web front-end to a CVS repository). Oh, and you can’t just attach to the CVS server and use good old command line tools – no, you have to use the web front-end, because otherwise it screws up the permssions for everybody else who uses the web tool.

Ok, I’m a team player. I’ll be nice.
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