I'm writing a letter to my congress critter and selected sendators. This is about the FAA's funding proposal (which is more rightly titled, "The Airline Elimination of General Aviation Fund"). Any comments appreciated.

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My name is Michael Moffitt and I am an active pilot and aircraft owner with a Cessna 172A based at Kendallville Municipal Airport in Kendallville, Indiana. For the past several years, I have been the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association's (AOPA) Airport Support Network Volunteer. I am writing you to express my views on the proposed FAA funding bill.

Allow me to give you a little background on Kendallville Municipal Airport. According to the Indiana Department of Transportation, there are roughly 15,000 take-offs and landings at Kendallville Airport each year. As I know you are aware, our small airports are much like the nation's highway system. Neither could survive on local and state funds alone and yet both our airports and our highways serve to connect our cities, provide for our defense and enhance our economy. It is for this reason that the Airport Improvement Program remains an essential part of the funding available for aviation. Kendallville Airport has received several federal grants under the Airport Improvement Program. By accepting those funds, the City of Kendallville, as airport sponsor, made certain legally binding obligations to the federal government. Among those obligations was an assurance known as Assurance 21. It reads, en toto, as follows:

21.Compatible Land Use. It will take appropriate action, to the extent reasonable, including the adoption of zoning laws, to restrict the use of land adjacent to or in the immediate vicinity of the airport to activities and purposes compatible with normal airport operations, including landing and takeoff of aircraft.

It is clear that the official position of the FAA is that schools constructed near airports are not compatible with normal airport operations. For example, a brochure published by the Southwest Region, Airport Division of the FAA, under the heading "NONCOMPATIBLE LAND USE" explicitly states "It is in the best interest of everyone that land uses such as residences, schools, hopitals [SIC], etc. not be located near an airport." ([link|http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/airports/regional_guidance/southwest/environmental/environmental_guide/media/broch99.doc|http://www.faa.gov/a...media/broch99.doc] )

Recently, I was joined by the AOPA, a former school administrator and more than a dozen pilots in an attempt to prevent a new elementary school from being constructed at a location where aircraft approaching Kendallville Airport to land are low to the ground, descending and turning. The location proposed for the school is directly under the traffic pattern (the line of flight of aircraft departing and arriving) and immediately adjacent to it. The distance from the runway itself to the location proposed for the school is 3,000 feet. Moreover, existing local zoning laws prohibited the construction of a school at the proposed location. And, of course, by accepting federal funds, the city had agreed to block such construction so near the airport.

To our collective profound regret, we were not joined by the City of Kendallville nor by the Kendallville Aviation Board of Directors in our opposition to the construction of a school at such an unwise location. Our independent efforts to get the local school board to work with the aviation community to find a site more suitable for the school failed. The City of Kendallville passed a \ufffdspecial exception\ufffd to its zoning law to allow the new school project to proceed. More alarming was the FAA's position. According to the FAA Chicago Airport District Office, a school merely 3,000 feet from a runway, directly under low, descending and turning aircraft was not \ufffdin the immediate vicinity\ufffd of the airport. Consequently, they reasoned, the City of Kendallville did not violate their obligation to prevent such construction under the terms of Assurance 21. This is, of course, ridiculous on its face. Clearly, within 1,000 yards or so is well within the \ufffdimmediate vicinity\ufffd of the airport. And any location directly under aircraft in the aircraft traffic pattern is certainly in the \ufffdimmediate vicinity\ufffd of the airport.

Although it pains me as a pilot at Kendallville Airport to say this, it does seem to me a waste of the limited funds available for supporting airports to issue grants to airport sponsors, like Kendallville's, whose support for their own airports is lackluster. In Kendallville's case, granting an exception to a zoning law in order to insure encroachment of Non-Compatible land use is certainly something less than strong support for the airport. It might well be that fear of losing federal support (or being required to repay the AIP funds it had already received) would have been sufficient motivation for the city to take no action on the zoning law. Literally taking no action whatsoever would have prevented the school from being constructed at the location selected, thereby blocking Non-Compatible land use encroachment. All this could have happened if the FAA had chosen to make a reasonable effort to enforce the contracts it signed with Kendallville instead of giving the laughable rationalizations it offered to make sure that it's contracts had not been violated.

The public is served quite well through the nation's airports. Therefore, the public should help defray some of the cost for the maintenance, support and growth of airports. This the public does through the Airport Improvement Program. The public pays to support these airfields and it expects that every effort will be made to insure that those airfields remain open and safe to the public. In its actions and decisions concerning this matter, the FAA betrayed that public trust. In distributing public monies, the FAA must be responsible. The FAA must make certain that when it allocates public funds to an airport sponsor, the airport sponsor will do everything in its power to insure that the airport remains safe and open to the public. Clearly, with respect to the federal funds the FAA distributed to the City of Kendallville for airport improvements, it did not do all in its power to insure that Kendallville Municipal Airport remains safe and open to the public.

Unless and until the FAA behaves more responsibly with the tax monies it distributes, it should not be allowed increases in funding. I therefore urge you to keep the FAA's funding at its current levels and not change in any way the source of that funding.

Best regards,
Michael Moffitt

And what ticks me off is the FAA will let them - after pumping several million dollars into developing the airport. Including a land grant that carries the condition that the airport remain as an airport open to the public in perpetuity. Now, the FAA did enforce that clause in Oceanside, CA, but its contract enforcement is spotty at best. Basically, whichever airport engineering/consulting firm "has a buddy at the ADO" gets the dough and they want to keep them at the taxpayers trough. So, they overlook pesky little things like keeping airports open - even though that's supposed to be their damned job.

The thing that makes it "illegal" is the contract an airport authority signs when it accepts funds under the FAA's Airport Improvement Program (funding 20% by the general fund by most estimates). This really got sticky when they added this to their contracts. Some states started screaming about the Fed telling the States what they could and could not do with their own land. The contract was carefully worded so that the airport sponsor was only required to do the best it could to prevent such projects from going forward. That's what ticked me off about Kendallville's situation. Kendallville not only did not do everything possible to prevent the school from going up, it actually took action to insure the school would be built. It actually made an exception to its own law to make sure the school could be built there. So, Kendallville is in the position (and the fsckers at the FAA are complicit) of claiming that "taking action to make sure something happens is the same thing as taking action to prevent something from happening."

BTW, depending on the aircraft, the height will be 300 to 700 feet over the school.