PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Weston Looking to Create More Class C Airspace
Old 29th Mar 2006, 08:11
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FlyingForFun

Why do it if it's not fun?
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
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Have never been to Dublin at all, let alone flown from Weston.

But I can relate to the dilema, because my home airport, Blackpool, has been steadily attracting more and more commercial traffic in the short time I've been there, and I've been able to watch the effect this has had on GA.

Admittedly, it's not a direct comparison, because Blackpool doesn't (yet) have any airspace other than its ATZ. But in my experience, the effects on GA have been limited to four specific areas:

1) Car parking. The area outside of all the flying clubs has been turned into long-term car parking for fare-paying passengers. The airport has arranged for users of the flying clubs to have free access to the car parks - but the fact is that we have experienced a drop in the number of people who walk up to our flying school with trial lesson enquiries which we believe is because they turn away when they see the car park barrier, before they notice that they will be entitled to park for free.

2) Utilitisation of the main runway. Since there is no parallel taxyway for half of the main runway, and the taxyway that runs parallel to the other half can not support the weight of an airliner, every airliner departing off 28 or arriving on 10 has to back-track the entire length of the runway, which effectively closes the runway for several minutes. Solution is to build a parallel taxyway, which is no doubt what will happen if the airport continues to grow - but this would (IMO) be done to facilitate more airliners, not because it would help GA!

3) Possible closure of smaller runways. There have been rumours about the closure of runways 25/07 and 31/13 for a long time. In fact, the fourth runway at Blackpool did close, but that was before I started flying from there.

Building works on the depature end of runway 07 did, in fact, close this runway for a short while. It would have been easy to re-open it by simply reducing the declared distances accordingly, but the aiport authorities apparently decided that the cost of doing this could not be justified, which I interpret as meaning that there was no benefit to the airliners in doing this. But the chaos which was caused by the runway closure caused ATC to look into the rules in more depth, and discovered that the displaced threshold and declared distances for the runways already accounted for a taller obstacle than any of the cranes the builders were using, and the runway re-opened. Hopefully, this experience will encourage the airport to keep the smaller runways open - although they have already decided not to replace the failing runway lights on 31/13, and this runway has been downgraded to daytime use only.

4) Re-fuelling. As the volume of jet traffic increased, this caused big delays for Avgas refuelling. This was solved by installing self-service pumps for Avgas.

I wonder how many of these issues would be relevant at Weston, or if there are any issues at Weston (besides controlled airpsace) which I haven't listed. Interesting comparison, maybe?

FFF
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