Onetrack, your assessment is spot on. I'm sitting on Rottnest right now, watching the turbine, aircraft, people, animals and birds happily co-existing. While I realize that a PhD in electrical engineering is a poor substitute for reading nutter websites, I'll nevertheless comment that the main reason for motoring some types of wind turbines is to reduce the start-up torque in light wind conditions.
In fact, motoring is common with other generation technologies, too. In a hydro system for example, it's quite common to run one or more machines as a synchronous capacitor to allow power factor correction and efficiency gains. A machine can also drive a pump, allowing water storage to be supplemented during time of excess energy availability.
If you want to look for concerns about wind turbines near major airports, consider the possible effects on radar systems due multiple, complex reflections from the structures and any metal blade components. The adaptive signal processing schemes to overcome such effects came from 'blue sky' research in radio astronomy and allied fields, and are now in routine use in new radar systems in the UK and elsewhere.