$100 user fee

From what I can see, Southwest has good union/management relationship, happy employees, well paid, respectable to the public, and is consistently profitable...do why all the references to drinking Kool Aid and CULTure like all those things are bad?
 
USMCmech said:
Exactly how much federal money does it cost to maintain a small county nontowered airport?
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I'll tell you what. It's a crap load. And it's totally unnecessary. And I wish it wasn't so.

There is this little airport in this tiny town of Deer Park, WA. (KDEW). I used to own a hangar there. After 9/11, the government decided the airport should be surrounded by a high fence and even paid for several very expensive vehicle gates that go up when you put in the access code (ELT frequency, Taliban would never figure that out). Every time I drove onto the airport via one of those gates I just shook my head at what a waste it was. Then, they decided to move the gas pumps over a ways to make for a better ramp and got the government to pay for it. I mean, this was a major construction project just to move the gas pumps over a tad and rebuild the ramp. This is still a tiny town that see's maybe 20 landings a day average over the year. It's stupid. A huge waste of taxpayer money. Then Todd tells us GA isn't paying their fair share of the bill....

The bill is for stupid stuff that shouldn't be. Give me a break.
 
I have a feeling you'd see things quite differently if you were in our position, pullup. To quote one of our pilots who spoke to the CEO at a dinner last week, "the only 'LUV' that AirTran pilots are feeling from Southwest is 'prison LUV.'"
 
Criminitly, and I thought I needed another "JC Break."
People are losing it all over JC this week.

131443075153-Abandon_thread_Jim.gif
 
JayAre said:
So is this for real? Or is AOPA baiting me to sign up?
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I have to admit to having turned my head around on this one. I used to be in favor of user fees; the whole "let the users pay for it" argument. But now I realize how much our nation benefits from having a strong aviation system. To me, it's the same thing as public education or the interstate highway system. Everyone benefits, even those who don't directly use them, so everyone should support it.

To me, this whole user fee debate is a micrcosm of what is going on in our national economy. Government keeps wanting to increase taxes, in the name of paying off the deficit, or funding this or that program. The taxes get increased, but the deficit reduction or program funding never seems to happen.

Like the saying goes, it's not a revenue problem, its a spending problem. In this case, we're spending all the money on increased government (i.e. the FAA), and we're not improving our system. A modernized NAS and ATC system would go a long way towards increasing efficiency and reducing costs, thus generating growth in the aviation sectors and increasing revenue. Instead, we spend the money on more FAA oversight, causing decreases in efficiency, and increases in cost. And then we all wonder why general aviation is dying, and commercial aviation is so unstable.
 
DE727UPS said:
I'll tell you what. It's a crap load. And it's totally unnecessary. And I wish it wasn't so.... It's stupid. A huge waste of taxpayer money. The bill is for stupid stuff that shouldn't be. Give me a break.
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Then there's the guy who hit a deer while landing down in St Maries a couple years ago, so he sues the city/county to try to make them put a fence around the whole airport there. Seriously? The airport has been operating for how many decades just fine, but now it needs a fence?

And I love the high "security" fences around airports and then the gate codes put right on a sign, or with highly cryptic references to public frequencies, wow, that's effective. I'm going to start locking my house front door but put a sign on it that says "key hidden under garden gnome". Great stewardship of public funding...
 
I completely agree about the fences, at my home drome they replaced perfectly good chain link fences with ridiculously expensive wrought iron ones with motorized gates that often don't work. One week after they did that some taggers got in and defaced several airplanes and someone stole all the fuel cards out of our club airplanes. I'm not sure if it's true or not but the county ops people told us the fences were to satisfy a TSA requirement. I say return TSA to what it should have been in the first place, to oversee baggage and passenger screening at airline terminals.
 
The TSA is everything security. I'm looking forward to the day they will have screeners for me to leave my neighborhood. Then I will feel safe!
 
As the OP of this thread I can see both sides of story. Most of us some where had a dream of flying. And most started that dream with our first flight in a GA aircraft. I've decided to renew with AOPA for now.

Please lock this thread!
 
JayAre said:
As the OP of this thread I can see both sides of story. Most of us some where had a dream of flying. And most started that dream with our first flight in a GA aircraft. I've decided to renew with AOPA for now.

Please lock this thread!
Click to expand...
In before the lock! Pay my AOPA to get their marketing off my back please.
 
I was a member now I'm not. Waiting for the right combination of swag to join again. A year subscription and all I get is a sticker and hat hahahah. Throw in a leatherman and a Martha King poster and we'll talk.
 
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