Bats Thwart Airbus; Panthers and Scrub Jays, Skytruck

It's getting so you can't improve your facilities anymore. A colony of rare bats has threatened development of a runway at Hamburg that Airbus wants to extend to facilitate a completion center for the A380F; and an elusive wildcat and a small bird that is said to be a territorial land hog have teamed up to disrupt Skytruck USA's importation plans.

Not only does the Airbus A380 need more separation than ATC now gives heavies, but it also likes long runways, especially in its freight variant. So as part of its preparation and delivery center for A380 freighters in Hamburg, Airbus negotiated for a runway extension of some 1932 ft (589m). Well, that was the deal, but no one asked the German NIMBY contingent, who have been forming human chains, singing kumbaya and filing lawsuits.

The A380, the environmentalists contend, is a threat to Kinder, Kuche and Kirche and all things truly Germanic. They would just as soon the company took its 100-job completion center elsewhere, like back to Toulouse where the airframes will be flying from (if the runway gets extended). The danger for Hamburgers is that Airbus might well decide to yank the 7,000 other Airbus and Airbus-dependent jobs in the town, as well.

The latest development, after Airbus and the church which owned the land Airbus wanted for the runway extension reached an agreement, was the discovery that some fruit trees, doomed to be covered with landfill to support the extension, are habitat for a protected species of bat.

So one of the largest things flying in Europe is stymied, temporarily at least, by one of the smallest. Which is a different problem from the one an American program which hopes to bring Naples, Florida, closer to Europe is having. The Florida expansion of Naples-based Skytruck isn't just important to the airplane importer; the City of Naples has planned an entire outreach program to the hothouse European economy of Poland around it.

Skytruck's product is the eponymous M28 Skytruck, made by PZL in Poland with some Antonov design features but Canadian Pratt & Whitney PT6A-65B engines and five-bladed Hartzell props.

The on-again, off-again deal with the airport authority has been held up because environmentalists have found signs of the endangered Florida Panther, and of a bird called a Florida Scrub Jay, a threatened species that is said to require 25 acres per mating pair. Most of the surviving scrub jays are in the military/NASA restricted lands at Cape Canaveral, where the safety zone around the rocket launch pads has protected their habitat.

The endangered Florida Panthers at issue are large cats, Puma concolor coryi, one of North America's 14 cougar subspecies. Only 70 of them believed to survive in the wild in Southwest Florida. The National Hockey League Florida Panthers have lost their last dozen games, but they're not endangered in the same way -- although they are at some risk of having their name changed to the Florida Scrub Jays.

FMI: www.airbus.com www.skytruck.us www.panther.state.fl.us