NPS & FAA Threaten Accessibility to U.S. National Parks

The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) and the FAA are about the short-sighted business of rewriting the regulations by which air tours over U.S. national parks are conducted. Extant drafts of the agencies’ Air Tour Management Plans (ATMPs) call for radical and reactionary measures the likes of eliminating air tours in their entirety in some U.S. parks and, in others, cutting such undertakings by as much as 86-percent.

In addition to dramatically curtailing park access for innumerable elderly, disabled, and very young visitors, the proposed ATMPs stand to undermine the air tour industry to a degree commensurate with the forced closures of many smaller air tour operators.

For purpose of safeguarding accessibility to America’s national parks and defending aerial tour operators from egregious governmental overreach, the Helicopter Association International (HAI) has devised an efficient and effective means by which individuals may speak out against the U.S. National Park Service’s and the FAA’s assorted Air Tour Management Plans.

Parties interested in voicing their concerns over or outright opposition to the proposed ATMPs germane to the following U.S. national parks are asked to visit one (or all) of the following URLs.

Parks at which NPS/FAA seeks to wholly eliminate air tours

• Badlands National Park, South Dakota: https://p2a.co/GsJ91jX
• Mount Rushmore National Park, South Dakota: https://p2a.co/OW3zMtB

Park at which NPS/FAA seek to cut aerial tours by 86-percent

• Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii: https://p2a.co/xLqpyFe

Park at which NPS/FAA seek to cut aerial tours by fifty-percent

• Haleakala National Park, Hawaii: https://p2a.co/BmxfXuu

Each of the antecedent URLs leads to web-page containing a description of the ATMP proposed for the corresponding park and a template by which users  may add their names to an oppositional message penned by the HAI or (preferably) write brief treatises expressing their personal opposition to big government’s attempt to undermine the universal accessibility fundamental to the ethos in service of which America’s national parks were founded.

Please take action on behalf of the air tour industry. Please support the universal accessibility to America’s national parks afforded by aerial tours.

Also, please note the deadline for submitting comments/opposition vis-à-vis the proposed ATMPs is 20 June 2023.

FMI: www.rotor.org