For anyone who says we shouldn't be looking at closing small towers/tracons, this is a picture of the long term parking lot at my facility today. 5 cars. That's it. We have one daily commercial flight and I often ask how many passengers are on board out of curiosity. Today there were 8. We used to have 3 daily flights that averaged 40-45 people on each one. All 3 of our private jets have been grounded since March. We have like 5 training aircraft based at the field and then another 25 or so ga guys that occasionally fly on the weekend. How can anyone look at this situation and say that staffing and maintaining our facility is not an egregious appropriation of taxpayer funds. Since the local politicians insist on keeping this ghost town of an airport running in the interest of protecting very few jobs at enormous cost, the local taxpayers should be stuck with the costs of doing so. However, federal taxpayers shouldn't also be burdened. This place is the titanic and has been slowly sinking for decades and nothing is going to change its destiny.
For anyone that says, "Oh but what about all the people that want to live there." There is not a single controller or trainee at our facility that would wants to be there. Everyone aspires to get out of this town someday and advance their career somewhere else. Even the people that are locals from the area would leave for greener pastures given the opportunity. At a minimum, we should give up our airspace to a surrounding facility that wants it (we're already scheduled to 804, we should accelerate the process while traffic is down). However, in addition to giving up the airspace, there is absolutely no reason for the field to towered. Many uncontrolled fields are much busier than we will ever be. Protecting jobs just for the sake of people having a job is completely ridiculous, especially when the controllers here could and should be much better utilized somewhere else in the NAS.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not represent the FAA
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