Ever wonder how busy your local airport is? Or how many federal grants it has received, totaling how much money? USA Today has made the basic data easily accessible via an interactive map, as part of a story it did this week about the fact that fees paid by airline passengers go to improve airports that have no scheduled air service. The story by Thomas Frank says it is "the first full accounting" of the Airport Improvement Program, which it calls "obscure." Perhaps to The Nation's Newspaper, but not to pilots and others who care about air transportation in rural America, which is largely private, not public, and depends on "general aviation" airports.
USA Today has a large readership among business travelers, and the story seems written and edited partly to get their dander up. The first quote calls the program "a complete waste of money," and follows a bit of lip curl: "Members of Congress say the general-aviation airports can attract development and provide services such as air-medical transport. The lawmakers also regularly use general-aviation airports to get around their districts and states, sometimes in planes with lobbyists," whose employers make planes available to the officials. The story says they took "2,154 trips on corporate-owned jets from 2001 to 2006," but doesn't say how many of those were to commerical airports, which have much general-aviation traffic.
That's not to say the story doesn't raise good questions. It notes that funding of the program increased even as private aviation declined and "commercial hubs faced the worst airline delays ever. A multibillion-dollar plan to avert gridlock in the skies has been delayed because the U.S. government has spent too little money building a new system to guide commercial flights, former Federal Aviation Administrator Marion Blakey says." (Read more)
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