Washington-Area ADIZ Drives Pilots Away

Almost two years after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, traffic is down by 50 percent at the Clarksville Airport in rural Maryland. With a 2400 ft. grass runway and a beautiful view of the countryside, Clarksville has been a peaceful respite for capitol area pilots who want to get away from it all without going too far.

But now, the Baltimore Sun reports, vast and often confusing airspace regulations in the Baltimore-Washington area have become so much of a hassle, pilots just don't want to deal with them any more. The Sun reports about half of the pilots who used to base at Clarksville have moved their aircraft away for good, or sold their planes out of sheer frustration. "They're flying a lot less because of all the hassles," said David Bassler, whose parents own the airport. "Most people do it for the enjoyment, and it takes the enjoyment out of it if you can't just fly at will."

The big fear among pilots in the DC area is that the five-month old ADIZ will be made permanent. That, they say, will kill general aviation for as many as 9,000 aviators in Maryland alone.

"I think that we are going to lose some [airports]," said Bruce Mundie, whose job is to inspect and license general aviation airports for the Maryland Aviation Administration. "Particularly those people who have the little privately owned facilities - some of those are going to disappear."

Right now, there are 143 airports in Maryland. Muncie is all but certain many of them will go the way of the dodo before too long. That would mean an end to the economic development general aviation has brought to may of Maryland's rural and suburban towns.

The government appears to be indifferent to the plight of GA pilots in the Del-Mar-Va area. Routes are almost intelligible. Maps are virtually impossible to read. NOTAMs pop up so fast the government has been searching for a better way to disseminate the information to as many pilots as possible as quickly as possible. Some are enacted with as little as two-hours' notice.

"You have to have a doctoral degree in map reading to get into the Washington area nowadays," said Mundie, who also is a veteran pilot.

"There's a section of people - maybe 25 to 30 percent - who are intimidated into not flying, and they're not likely to come back until this goes away," said Boni Caldeira, a flight instructor at Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg (MD). Caldeira said his business is down sharply, even after he was allowed to reopen the airpark, several months after 9/11.

Security concerns among air traffic controllers have clearly overridden safety concerns. Last month, a pilot crashed in Maryland's White Marsh after circling outside the ADIZ until he ran out of fuel. In the meantime, controllers were looking for his clearance (which the apparently lost).

"All of us knew that at some point in time, somebody was going to have an accident like this," said Richard Glasser, a pilot from Alexandria (VA). "All of these incidents are occurring when people have done the right thing and all they want to do is get home."

Short-Handed TRACON Means GA Pilots Get The Short End Of The Stick

 When the Potomac TRACON opened in April, it was supposed to be fully staffed by 187 controllers. To this day, the TRACON is chronically short by some 20 controllers. The number of personnel slots allocated to Potomac will supposedly rise to 211 someday, but that could be months or even years away.

What's that mean for GA flyers? "Our VFR traffic has somewhere between doubled and tripled from normal," said Jim Davis, president of the Potomac branch of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "That is a tremendous increase in workload for controllers. I don't believe anybody was really prepared for this. We have certain priorities that are set in our handbook," Davis said. "And our first instinct is going to be to stop and slow down the VFR traffic."

"It's killing the business inside the [Air Defense Identification Zone]," said Wendy Carter, manager of the Montgomery County Airpark. It is home to some 250 GA aircraft and is one of 23 public airports inside the Washington ADIZ. Ms. Carter says at least seven tenants have bolted from the field, while most of the others don't show up at all. "They're being good tenants and they're paying their bills, but they're not flying," she said.

The Baltimore Sun reports Lee Schiek, manager of College Park Airport, said activity at the airport has declined 96 percent since the attacks. All but 22 of the 90 planes that once called College Park home have left for airports farther from Washington. Schiek jokes that he is the "aviation equivalent of the Maytag repairman."

The repeated defections have left the airport's maintenance chief, Dick Kreis, scrambling to find work. Kreis, who owns Skybird Aviation, said his business is down 60 percent. He's thinking of retiring.

"I'm dying. I can't continue like this," he said.

FMI: www.aopa.org, Potomac TRACON