General aviation at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport is soaring. For the first nine months of 2012, MacArthur saw a 33% increase in flights by GA planes based at the airport compared with the same period in 2011, according to a report from Newsday. General aviation flights by planes not based at MacArthur jumped 15.5% in the same time frame.
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Janice Wood is editor of General Aviation News.
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In an effort to control the increase in GA traffic the Islip Town Board recently instituted a minimum landing fee of $10. This fee, along with a fuel price of not much under $7.00 per gallon should reduce the number of pure GA flyers coming to Long Island to visit their famous beaches and spend money in the local economy.
The landing fee is expected to bring in $150,000 per year, less of course, the cost of collection – a contracted. company – and the additional Town employees that will need to be hired.
When queried about this fee no making economic sense, the response was “Hey, we’re politicians, not business people. We don’t have to make sense”
Yours in total disgust,
The fee isn’t a bad idea. All Long Island Airports and most across the country have a landing fee. The amount – $10.00 for a General Aviation aircraft, even for a touch and go – was not well conceived. It will have an impact on the number of aircraft coming into ISP by reducing use at underutilized airport even more. I’m skeptical about the increased operations numbers the airport is reporting. They haven’t done a good job reporting operations or airline enplanements for years. For instance, 20 years ago, 1.2 million people got on airplanes when 7 airlines were flying 65 flights a day out of the airport. Now, with the corruptly structured Southwest Airlines agreement, only two airlines fly about 19 flights a day and who knows how many less enplanements. You can’t totally blame the economy; the downfall began about 10 years ago because of bad political decisions. The same thing is happening today, as we see with the new landing fees. The difference from 10 or 15 years ago to today, you had a professional experienced airport management staff. Today, you have politically appointed management with little to no experience managing an airport. An ex-cop, and an airline station manager, who both may have worked at various airports doesn’t qualify them to run a facility. It translates to bad decisions, or bad recommendations when questions like – how much should we charge for landing fees, and who should be charged.