East Hampton Airport will become a prior permission “private” airfield on May 19 after a two-day closure. The FAA has carried out an airspace analysis and has approved the tony resort community’s plan to take over operation of the airport and limit noise by limiting access. East Hampton Airport will close on May 17 to conduct the transition and reopen on May 19 as East Hampton Town Airport. The FAA said it had a look at the airspace and had no objection to the change as long as the town takes over establishment and maintenance of its own instrument procedures.
The town has hired Flight Tech Engineering to design the approaches and they will not be publicly available. “Only those entities specifically authorized by the airport owner will have access to use those special IFPs,” a statement on the transition said. “The airport operator will provide the IFR procedures to the authorized users.” It’s not clear who will be allowed access to the airport and what criteria will be used to grant permission or when the new procedures will be available. The town announced its intention to move to a PPR format after all its obligations tied to previous FAA grants had expired. The town received numerous complaints every summer about the parade of helicopters and private jets that delivered the rich and famous to their vacation homes.
Hopefully the town will now suffer a loss of income as a result of this privatization. It’s no different than if they closed off all the roads leading into the town and added access gates at each road.
Three guesses starting with landing and tiedown fees how the costs generated by hiring outside consultants will be addressed by the town.
If instrument procedures are private, how do they get into the navigators used on approved aircraft for landing? Not that I plan on going there. Rich people scare me! LOL!
“The town received numerous complaints every summer about the parade of helicopters and private jets that delivered the rich and famous to their vacation homes.”
If most of the noise came from the rich dilatants coming and going to their land holdings, why is this going to change anything? I cannot imagine there are that many “poor” people that fly in and out of that airport. It is not like it is close to anything.’
As a tax payer, I’m not happy that the FAA just handed over an airport that was basically built by tax payers. Yes, I want my money back from these Gentry.
Me too
There’s a so-called private airport by me. The owner(s) are cheap as all get out. So cheap, they won’t and don’t have their runway published on any sectional. It won’t even show up on any GPS. So what would ever happen in an emergency? The nearest button on any aircraft GPS wouldn’t show said airport, even if one was right over the top of it. Could this also happen to East Hampton? You better believe it.
I live in an area with a lot of private airports, many of them public-use. All of which were built by the landowner, and are maintained without the benefit of local/federal funds. IMHO, it should not be sufficient for the East Hampton airport authority to have satisfied all current FAA grant encumbrances; they should be required to repay all of the tax-payer funds that went into those grants. It would probably still be less than the cost of finding sufficient land and starting from scratch, but it wouldn’t be quite so much of a wealth-transfer to the already wealthy.
Yes, this clearly is a transfer or gift of public property to a private party in as much as they now can restrict public use. If this gifting of public use property to entities that can then restrict or pick and chose who THEY will allow to use is permissible for airports that simply wait out grant expirations whats to stop the same with other federally funded infrastructure? If you voted for Trump or visited Washington DC on Jan 6, 2020 then maybe you will be denied access to the Amtrak station or use of the interstate? After all, supporting “insurrection” is much worse than suffering aircraft noise (would be the argument). Maybe the same for the folks that attended a BLM rally or voted for Biden? Sounds crazy but thats the path we are on.