MarkD
8th Jul 2003, 20:53
This article appeared in the Globe and Mail this morning after a Beech Baron twin was lost in Lake Ontario on approach to Toronto City Airport. (Pilot's name was Jon Gregg)
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030708/UBARBM/TPComment/Columnists
One more reason to get rid of island airport
By JOHN BARBER
Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - Page A16
One thing we know for sure about that tragic flight from Chicago: It didn't originate at Meigs Field, the Chicago waterfront's equivalent of our own island airport. We know that because Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, long concerned about the dangers of small planes landing and taking off in the shadows of his city's famous skyscrapers, shut down Meigs permanently this year by plowing up its runways.
Yesterday's crash just south of the Toronto City Centre Airport -- not, mercifully, just north of it -- grimly confirms the wisdom of that controversial decision. Although his opponents accused Mr. Daley of cynically exploiting post-9/11 security concerns with his midnight bulldozer raid on Meigs, the Toronto crash underscores an important new difference between the two cities: Since the bulldozers did their spring cleanup at Meigs, small planes are no longer feeling their way along the edges of Chicago's Loop in the fog.
(The crash also reminds us why mainstream commercial aviation originally abandoned the island airport for the empty fields of Malton half a century ago: too much fog on the waterfront.)
But the most important difference between Chicago and Toronto is that political leaders here, led by lame-duck Mayor Mel Lastman, want to turn our dangerous, polluting, bankrupt waterfront airfield into a major commercial operation. While Mr. Daley gathers international accolades for his determined pursuit of a green and welcoming waterfront (Meigs is fated to become a park), Toronto sticks just as tenaciously with an "economic-development" policy that was discredited in the 1940s.
The case for expanding the island airport certainly didn't improve when industrial smog -- not fog -- temporarily grounded aircraft operating there under visual flight rules last week. But neither the prospect of a major new source of pollution on the waterfront nor the safety questions raised by yesterday's crash will have much effect locally. The case for expanding the airport -- despite the facility's steady loss of business over decades -- was never rational.
The cursory environmental assessment on which airport promoters rely to justify a bridge to the airport -- one of the last procedural stumbling blocks facing them after city council approved the project last month -- barely touches either safety or environmental issues. Originally conducted and now being updated by the engineering company that designed the airport bridge, it seems carefully planned not to notice the obvious.
Toronto's folly, in other words, appears bombproof. While tens of thousands of informed, disinterested citizens gape at the stupidity of trying to build a major airport on the downtown waterfront, council heeds only a handful of vested interests out to make a dollar in the lucrative public-private sector. "Tunnel vision" does not come close to describing the cognitive impairment that afflicts a majority of councillors at Toronto City Hall.
In that respect, one can't help but think of the airport in light of the half-built Spadina Expressway and its mercifully unbuilt siblings, which many suburban politicians continued to support fervently until long after one saner, senior politician -- William Davis by name -- scrapped them. They still do: If city council could afford to rip down stable, downtown neighbourhoods to build expressway interchanges today, it would probably try to do so. Two of the votes would likely come from sons of politicians who led the charge for urban expressways in the first place.
But to say that City Council will always determine to do the wrong thing despite all the evidence thrown in its face -- and the media cheering it on, more often than not -- does not mean that the wrong things will always happen. Reality plays a strong role outside City Hall, and it is not always compatible with the thought bubbles emanating from within. It's our only hope now.
[email protected]
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030708/UBARBM/TPComment/Columnists
One more reason to get rid of island airport
By JOHN BARBER
Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - Page A16
One thing we know for sure about that tragic flight from Chicago: It didn't originate at Meigs Field, the Chicago waterfront's equivalent of our own island airport. We know that because Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, long concerned about the dangers of small planes landing and taking off in the shadows of his city's famous skyscrapers, shut down Meigs permanently this year by plowing up its runways.
Yesterday's crash just south of the Toronto City Centre Airport -- not, mercifully, just north of it -- grimly confirms the wisdom of that controversial decision. Although his opponents accused Mr. Daley of cynically exploiting post-9/11 security concerns with his midnight bulldozer raid on Meigs, the Toronto crash underscores an important new difference between the two cities: Since the bulldozers did their spring cleanup at Meigs, small planes are no longer feeling their way along the edges of Chicago's Loop in the fog.
(The crash also reminds us why mainstream commercial aviation originally abandoned the island airport for the empty fields of Malton half a century ago: too much fog on the waterfront.)
But the most important difference between Chicago and Toronto is that political leaders here, led by lame-duck Mayor Mel Lastman, want to turn our dangerous, polluting, bankrupt waterfront airfield into a major commercial operation. While Mr. Daley gathers international accolades for his determined pursuit of a green and welcoming waterfront (Meigs is fated to become a park), Toronto sticks just as tenaciously with an "economic-development" policy that was discredited in the 1940s.
The case for expanding the island airport certainly didn't improve when industrial smog -- not fog -- temporarily grounded aircraft operating there under visual flight rules last week. But neither the prospect of a major new source of pollution on the waterfront nor the safety questions raised by yesterday's crash will have much effect locally. The case for expanding the airport -- despite the facility's steady loss of business over decades -- was never rational.
The cursory environmental assessment on which airport promoters rely to justify a bridge to the airport -- one of the last procedural stumbling blocks facing them after city council approved the project last month -- barely touches either safety or environmental issues. Originally conducted and now being updated by the engineering company that designed the airport bridge, it seems carefully planned not to notice the obvious.
Toronto's folly, in other words, appears bombproof. While tens of thousands of informed, disinterested citizens gape at the stupidity of trying to build a major airport on the downtown waterfront, council heeds only a handful of vested interests out to make a dollar in the lucrative public-private sector. "Tunnel vision" does not come close to describing the cognitive impairment that afflicts a majority of councillors at Toronto City Hall.
In that respect, one can't help but think of the airport in light of the half-built Spadina Expressway and its mercifully unbuilt siblings, which many suburban politicians continued to support fervently until long after one saner, senior politician -- William Davis by name -- scrapped them. They still do: If city council could afford to rip down stable, downtown neighbourhoods to build expressway interchanges today, it would probably try to do so. Two of the votes would likely come from sons of politicians who led the charge for urban expressways in the first place.
But to say that City Council will always determine to do the wrong thing despite all the evidence thrown in its face -- and the media cheering it on, more often than not -- does not mean that the wrong things will always happen. Reality plays a strong role outside City Hall, and it is not always compatible with the thought bubbles emanating from within. It's our only hope now.
[email protected]