For more than 30 years, I’ve tracked residential airparks and encouraged their development and encouraged the aviation community to support them.
Most flyin communities are private – owned and private – use but a significant number have been established over the years on property adjacent to public-owned and public-use airports. These residential airparks have provided financial support, security and even helped FBOs with their business.
Unfortunately, the FAA has taken a ridiculous stand against residential airparks at public-owned airports. The result has been threats to restrict grants for airport improvements and demands for repayment of past grants. The FAA has demanded that TTF (through the fence) agreements be canceled, causing property owners to suffer financial loss as they tried to sell a home.Under fire from the flying community, the FAA issued Airport Compliance Manual Order 5190.6b, prohibiting TTF access.
Under the leadership of Brent Blue, the residential airpark community has fought back. He has been outspoken in his attempts to get this silly piece of FAA rule reversed, especially since it was published without any input from the aviation community at all. And, using Freedom of Information requests as well as your responses to questions we published in General Aviation News and Living With Your Plane, Blue found that the FAA’s supposed reasons for the rule were completely without merit. None of the claims of the FAA were supported by their own records.
Now, the Community Airport Access and Protection Act of 2010 has been introduced in the House by Representative Sam Graves (R-Missouri) and Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa). Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), has introduced the legislation in the Senate.
I encourage you to contact your Congressional delegations and encourage their support for this legislation and I want to express my personal thanks to Blue for his untiring efforts.
APRIL 2 UPDATE FROM BRENT BLUE: The Senate amendment did not make it to the appropriations bill which recently passed. Congressman Graves’ office has not let us know when their bill will be coming up. I will let everyone know as soon as I know.
What appears “ridiculous” to you has a history. When TTF developers walk away from their sold out developments with a few million in their pockets and the FAA is left to support the airport infrastructure for the rest of the life of the airport facilities it may not seem so ridiculous. TTF fees are usually paltry amounts that the airport sponsors assess. What invariably happens is that developers manage to manipulate local airport comissions without their understanding the implications. For example, did you know that none of the airport Rules and Regulations extend TTF? Developers want access rights that are deeded with their land; that “encumbers” the title to the airport land which is one among many basic violations of sound stewardship that the FAA has to look at. In TTF land, rogue FBO’s can set up whithout paying any of the fees that the FBO’s inside the fence are required to pay, hence, you get unfair competition. Now, you think there would be a middle ground where the TTF developer would agree to pay a “just” fee, and be bound by the same regulations as inside the fence, and agree to term period access,
…good luck with that one!!! You are just being myopic looking at this as how much fun would it be to “live with your airplane” and taxi across to the runway. Everyone has the visceral reaction to the FAA without ever thinking that these people are as intelligent as you and might actually have a reason for what they do. Actually, they are mostly bright engineers that aren’t very good at communicating sometimes.