Just something to brighten the day...

An elegant airplane from a more civilized age...

Doldrums...

As I write the Israelis are continuing their operations in Lebanon. The ‘peaceful and delightfully social-conscious’ members of Hezbollah are actively trying to get surface to air missile from Iraq, who in turn will have most likely procured said missiles from either China or Russia and all is moving merrily toward Armageddon…

Oh, come on! You can’t believe that. Armageddon is not coming soon, at least not until the Israelis finally decide that enough is enough and drop a nuke on the nutjobs running Syria and Iran, but that is not likely to happen because the Israelis, being westerners and attuned to western morality, are not Muslims and therefore they don’t see homicidal- suicide actions as valiant and noble deeds.

So relax.

I am writing this while I wait in a wholly, a disconcertingly wholly, empty terminal ‘D’ at KCLE, otherwise known as Cleveland Hopkins International. CLE is an airport that I have never been too and much like my former local airport, KPKB, it looks as though the airport management has succeeded in completely screwing up the place. You see terminal D is the only part of the airport that is both lit up (because the 18 foot ceilings and glass all around), it is also the only terminal that doesn’t stink of mildew and some other funk that I have long learned to associate with a third world country. Parkersburg is only in the same league because of its sister airport to the east, KCKB, Clarksburg.

This terminal should be bustling, as it is, jetways are serviced by EMB-135s and Beech 1900s. I myself flew in on a SAAB 340. But there should be some 737s in front of me and a few A321s thrown in for good measure. At KPKB, there should be an alternative to Continental Express, and there used to be.

Midwest, the commuter servicing US Air used to fly full Beech 1900s out of Parkersburg to KPIT several times a day. Then one day, poof! They were gone and some goofy white Swedish T-prop showed up. I should mention that the same goofy white T-prop flew out of PKB today only a third full. Somebody screwed up.

You see, Cleveland, City of Lights, City of Magic (COLCOM) (a thinly veiled reference to Gary Newman and his some of the same name; and a title that I always add every time I reference the same city on the shores of Lake Erie), Cleveland COLCOM is NOT the gateway hub that say Charlotte, Dulles or Atlanta, heck Cincinnati, is. Cleveland COLCOM, is, well, Cleveland, and frankly that says pretty much everything.

Now somebody, somebody, most a person who was from the same graduating class as the brain trusts that relegated the serious traffic to the dank and smelly A, B and C concourses here, while leaving the spacious and light-filled D concourse empty, save for silly little jungle jets and airplanes built in a country better known for socialism, buxom blue-eyed blondes and a really slick armored vehicle called a C-SU. The world is not right.

Back to CKB.

If you were to travel to Clarksburg (really the airport is in Bridgeport, but that is another aside) and look at that airport, you would see what airports should be; vital, busy, local engines of economic commerce. On the field at CKB resides Pratt and Witney, KCI aviation, the United States Army Fixed Wing Training Site, and a host of other concerns all producing a lot of jobs and work for the community. PKB, with its unobstructed approaches and strategic location on a plateau above the river valley, is, well, the largest empty ramp in the world. There is precisely one activity on the airfield of any significance and that is Mary’s Plane View Restaurant, which is an excellent place to eat.

Why is this?

Immediately, the answer is gross incompetence. Principally a failure to see an airport for what it is; open real estate that can be managed with a lithe mind into a vibrant economic exercise and value-added benefit for a community. Or, if one chooses to utilize a dullard as an airport manager, a blank piece of grass and asphalt just begging for real estate people to show up and turn it into a golf course community with homes starting at say $325,000.00. Less inspired ‘dirt’ people might choose strip mall or failing to utilize any creativity at all, a giant morass of tract homes…if you are really an idiot, you cut big “x”s into the runway at night and make a giant park for your wife. Only mayors of corrupt cities get that privilege so by the time you get there you have really crossed over to the dark side.

All of this starts with the person/persons placed in charge of the airport.

Now there are pressures on an airport manager. Communities of the modern age hate airports. They hate the noise. They fear that every airplane on approach is going to end up a pile of flaming wreckage in their living room, or worse, in the local elementary school yard. They have lost their sense of wonder at the magic of aviation because low cost carriers have turned the B737-7 into the most technologically advanced form of mass transit the world has ever seen. The B737 is just a bus to most people and frankly, a bus that takes them to their obliged business meetings in Sioux Falls, Crazy Aunt Millie’s in Philly every 10 years or to the dreaded 5 day Disney World nightmare when their children hit 5. So not only have people been desensitized to the magic of flight through low cost carriers, they have also been made even more annoyed by what that access opens up to them. I know I sound the cynic, but again, I am in an empty Concourse D.

The United States is unfortunately unable to remedy this problem. We are just a smidge too big. I have traveled this nation coast to coast on Amtrak. It takes about 56 hours. Well, I should qualify that; I have gone from Toledo to Sacramento and that is not quite coast to coast, but long enough. Long enough to understand that trains are not the answer. Even if we were to come up with something like the French TGV, it would still take something in excess of a day to go from NYC to San Francisco. The principal obstacle being the very un-French, but very American in a breathtaking sense, Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains. You can do the same trip in a silly little jungle jet in about 5 hours, and get this, it will cost LESS!

Nobody wants to take the train, because the trains smell like Concourses A and B at KCLE. People can take the smell for a couple of hours (as they must as they wait for their connecting flight) but not for 56 hours. That is a problem. You pay more, you smell more and in the end it costs you more time to get there. Trains are not the answer.

As I look around CLE I see a lot of excess capacity. Cleveland COLCOM is a city on a ventilator with serious heart failure. It now holds the distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the entire state of Ohio; something over 30%. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame notwithstanding, this town is dying. It is dying because it was built on manufacturing and that is rapidly becoming a foreign concept to the people of the USA.

The USA is today a niche technology giant with a lot of services thrown in for support. Microsoft is a niche company in terms of manufacturing and even then, its products will be made in some sweatshop governed by Beijing and not in unused industrial space in Elyria, OH. Cleveland’s weather sucks. I mean that, there is just no better word. Frankly, Ohio’s weather sucks. If you are a car worker who has a high school education with little in the way of technology background, you will put up with weather that sucks because you have a good job at GM. When GM implodes, well you may not have many options. You technology savvy friends will have moved on to the Carolinas, which is where all Ohioans REALLY want to move too. That is why Raleigh-Durham has exploded in terms of growth; good weather, smart people, supportable industry.

The other reason why I know that Cleveland COLCOM is dying is the NASA hangar on the field at CLE.

Huh!?!

Yep, the NASA hangar.

The NASA hangar at CLE looks like a giant eyesore. The paint is faded, the hangar is a dump. The principal space agency of the US Government is maintaining a facility that looks like it should sit at Baikonur (Baikonur for those of you who are not aware, is the ramshackle ‘space city’ of the Russians. It is actually no longer in Russia so it makes it all the more poetic. Probably prophetic because at the rate Cleveland COLCOM is going, Canada, with its tar sands, might just try to buy Cleveland COLCOM and use it for storing oil field equipment). Cleveland COLCOM may someday no longer be part of the USA. When neither NASA nor the airport people at CLE feel it important enough to have a nice shiny hangar, it tells you something…and what it tells you is not good.

Parkersburg, for its part, just doesn’t build anything to get ugly. As you fly over PKB, you see space everywhere. Just sitting there, waiting for a maintenance base, long-term aircraft storage, simulator-training facilities…SOMETHING…other than grass to be mowed. It is so sad. Even sadder because last week at Oshkosh I got to fiddle with the disaster that Microsoft is called MSFS X. I pulled up KPKB and found my airplane sitting on an airport with taxiways to nowhere and incomplete runways. THIS at the debut of the software at the world’s largest general aviation air show/fly-in. Maybe Microsoft knows something about PKB that the rest of us only suspect?

So what is the solution?

I suppose we have to define which problem. I’ll save you the trouble and deal with one; incompetent airport managers. The simple issue is to fire them and find the youngest, most inspired airplane-loving freak kid that you can and tell them to dream big and make it work. PKB languishes because of a desire to live with the status quo. No flights, no noise, no complaints, no work, no marketing, no worries. Milquetoast existence for a manager that demonstrates that his or her top priority is to slip away with nothing but mediocrity in their path.

The strength of PKB, and CLE for that matter lies in what they do have. They have crappy weather. It is no secret that Ohio is the absolute best place in the nation to work on IFR ratings. An inspired manager would have Embry-Riddle based on the field to train their pilots. I have flown with a few E-R graduates and they didn’t do so well in Ohio weather. The Buckeye state should be selling itself as THE place to come if you want to be a proficient instrument pilot.

The second step is to focus on recurrency and maintenance. When you have a lot of empty real estate that does nothing except use gasoline to keep the lawn short, the answer is to find a way to get people on the field. After all, that is exactly what every airport-enemy, read “real estate” developer, wants to do. The idea is to make all that grass pay for itself. In the case of non-airport activities that means golf courses, condos or shopping malls. Airports can survive if they see the real estate in the same way. While it looks pretty to see all the grass, with the exception of those areas needed for regulation separation from active approaches and runways, every bit of the field needs to be occupied by paying folks.

The problem with this is that it takes an aggressive advocate to convince local leaders and business people that the field is the place where they want to be. This is not for the faint of heart. You can put a J3 up at 3000 feet. High enough that the engine will make less noise than a lawn mower on the ground and you will have the whiner that complains about the airport ‘noise’ and the treachery of these machines that could fall from the sky at any moment and kill innocent people. My personal opinion is that this group is both squeaky and small in number. Unfortunately these days it seems that they get the greatest ear. We need to change this and airport managers have to be willing to see the small number as the distractor from the greatest good.

So will it happen?

My feeling is that we are seeing the end of days for general aviation. Nobody save for a few people have a vision for the small airports of our country. The light sport aircraft movement is very interesting but in the absence of wonder on the part of young people, there is no motivation for increasing the numbers of pilots. The AOPA is concerned about this as well. People simply are not lining up to learn how to fly. Video games have a lot to do with this. People can experience much of flight by sitting at the computer. They miss out on the passion of the exercise and the feel of the wind and the sound of the air around you, but for many people, getting 80% of the experience is enough. Even if a kid gets past the video game and out to the airport, there are few flight schools left to bridge the distance between the fence and the sky.

A kid standing at an airport fence dreaming of flying will remain right there unless there is an instructor to lead him to the airplane. Some major things will have to change to reverse what has become the state of affairs in flight training. It is simply too expensive for most flight schools to remain in business.

The last impediment to flying among the masses is the discount airline. It is simply no longer novel for people to fly…well, at least ride…in an airplane. For $250.00 anybody can get a ticket to somewhere and experience a ride in an airplane. This is well within the means of most Americans. So you can’t find a school, you can sort of fly on a computer and if you really want to experience life in the clouds, $250.00 will do it for you.

Much has changed in 20 years.

Airports and aviation need to change. Not just for the sake of general aviation but for the sake of the survival of commercial aviation. The fact of the matter is that the military cannot supply the number of commercial pilots that our nation needs. The pilot pool is aging rapidly and very shortly, within a few years, there is going to be a dramatic shortage of qualified pilots in the United States. 40 years ago, between the military, local flight schools and the odd foreign pilot that arrived at our shores, we could train what we need. Not today. The development of light jet air taxis is a novel idea, but if there are few pilots to fly them, the new jets mean nothing.

Airports need to change as well. The nation needs to start seeing the local general aviation airport as an integral part of this nation’s security and safety. One need only look at the number of small airplanes that supported Hurricane Katrina Relief to see that small airplanes were integral to national disaster relief. Those little airplanes reside at the nation’s small airports. But those same airports need revenue streams to keep them alive.

Airport/airplane lovers around the nation need to communicate with their city councils and airport managers. We need to tell them that airports need to be financial powerhouses if they are to remain viable and economically attractive to communities. At some point, if a community’s job base has a large share at the local airport the whiners who complain of the noise will become marginalized be people who see the airport as a significant source of income.

The last item in this change is the need for a real concern about the state of terminals and how airports look. One of the gripes that I have about CLE is that here in the beautiful terminal D I have a full view of the less-than-beautiful terminal C and even bigger eyesores known as A and B. As capacity shrinks, airport management needs to look long term at really making the terminals look good. One of the prettiest terminals in the country is, get this, KHLG, or Wheeling, Ohio County, WV. The airport management has taken a terminal that looks like it is suited to the age of the DC-3 and turned it into one of the finest museums and tributes to commercial aviation that I have every seen. You walk into a terminal that is filled with things that people want to look at. It is worth the trip to Wheeling just to take a look.

There is a lot to be done if our commercial aviation system is to remain healthy and viable. The generation coming up will have a lot to do with what remains of general aviation in the next 20 to 40 years. This generation is going to have to become vocal at an early age if they are going to salvage anything that resembles what those of us who are older remember fondly as the time of wonder for general aviation.

Fly Safe