Category: Flying

As expected, the shit storm

After that article in the paper, I got email from a member of the club. He was rather upset that I’d presumed to speak for the club (which I hadn’t, although the article did identify me as a secretary of the club) and that I’d presumed to speak for all parties involved in the closing, citing problems that this would cause for commercial operators and airlines and the controllers themselves. I never did presume to speak for them – I was asked for my opinion as a private pilot and a user of the air traffic control facilities and the airport, and I did so. When they ask a football player for a quote about a game, do people assume he’s expressing the opinion of the team management, the other players, and the league? I don’t think so.
Continue reading “As expected, the shit storm”

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.

He made it!

Steve Fossett made it – first solo unrefueled flight around the world. I’m thrilled. No particular reason why. It’s not like in the grand scheme of things it’s as important as Americans dying in Iraq and the genocide in Sudan, but I’m thrilled. It’s just fun. And once again Burt Rutan proves that if there is an aviation challenge, he can design and build the airplane (or spacecraft) to meet it. I’m even more thrilled to hear that Space Ship One is going to be at Oshkosh this year. That’s just doubled my conviction that I need to go.

In other news, I got my laptop back from the shop. The hinge is definitely stiffer than it was (I think they replaced the whole screen, not just the hinge), but it fails the “propped up on your knees while sitting on the couch” test – it still flops down, just slower.

And in other news, I’m at Piedmont Hawthorne waiting for the flying club officer’s meeting to start, and the god-damned wireless internet connection blocks outgoing ssh and telnet connections. Thank God I installed Squirrel Mail so at least I can read my email, even if I can’t read news.