The upcoming stacked leave apocalypse

the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few

?


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Gillette, Wyoming contract tower just closed permanently. City decided there wasn’t enough benefit to keep it open after all this Covid stuff. Hasn’t been a huge impact on us Center guys, after all, we’re just one in one out anyways.

GCC was worked by county employees. I believe they all had other duties in addition to their ATC jobs. Not like closing a federal contract tower.
 
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 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 if 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 FAAView attachment 4157
Update: it seemed as though passenger counts were slightly trending upwards as determined by the amount of cars in the parking lot. I think on one day leading up to labor day weekend I counted upwards of 15 cars in the parking lot! But here we are today, 2 months later on a Tuesday and there are literally 3 cars in the long term lot and it's not even winter yet. Seriously, why are we open? #Justshutitdownalready
 
Update: it seemed as though passenger counts were slightly trending upwards as determined by the amount of cars in the parking lot. I think on one day leading up to labor day weekend I counted upwards of 15 cars in the parking lot! But here we are today, 2 months later on a Tuesday and there are literally 3 cars in the long term lot and it's not even winter yet. Seriously, why are we open? #Justshutitdownalready
I agree, facilities like this should be shut down, hopefully the FAA and NATCA use this opportunity for fundamental change and consolidate every level 5 up/down and contract level 4 towers.
 
I agree, facilities like this should be shut down, hopefully the FAA and NATCA use this opportunity for fundamental change and consolidate every level 5 up/down and contract level 4 towers.
I think once glass technology advances we will see that

Edit-by glass I mean the ability to have remote towers. You could consolidate 3 level fours, make them a level 12 (or 4^3) put the facility on long island (so you can always have tower trainees from the biggest contributors)
 
I think once glass technology advances we will see that

Edit-by glass I mean the ability to have remote towers. You could consolidate 3 level fours, make them a level 12 (or 4^3) put the facility on long island (so you can always have tower trainees from the biggest contributors)
Isnt that what Vatsim is for?
 
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