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Issue link: http://airportbusiness.epubxp.com/i/140389
FUNDINGFOCUS The quagmire for the FAA then becomes, if control towers are necessary for airport safety, how could the agency possibly be attempting to cut them out of the National Airspace System (NAS) without first conducting a thorough audit of how those shutdowns might affect airport operations? Or, if the towers were never necessary for safety reasons, why did the FAA support the contract tower program in the first place? These legal issues certainly made Fulton wonder from Austin. "What concerned me the most is that there are 251 contract towers in the program that handle 30 percent of towers operated in the United States. And the FAA says that [cutting most of them] wouldn't affect safety, which is somehow confusing to me. We [originally] built those towers for safety and economic development." When the FAA announced the potential closings in March, Administrator Michael Huerta claimed the agency had analyzed the safety issues and concluded safety was not a concern, a finding industry experts doubted considering the workload involved in reviewing data from hundreds of airports. Then too, there were the public comments from many airport managers claiming no one from the FAA had ever contacted them to so much as discuss safety issues before making a shutdown decision. WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY? Fulton spoke to another critical element in the contract tower debate: "ATC is not bounded by geography. It has always been a national responsibility and to say that this not a federal responsibility makes no sense to me. The FAA's own audit said they provide comparable service at much less cost." Poole raised another concern that he's spoken on time and again over the past decade … privatization of the ATC system. "I think the perspective on ATC privatization has changed recently. People are really fed up to their eyeballs with the Administration," he says. "I think this [contract tower issue and controller furloughs] has been a wakeup call to everyone, especially since the Airport and Airway Trust Fund was set up from the beginning specifically to protect the system against these kinds of problems." Despite the value of organizations like the Contract Tower Association and other alphabet groups, no one should depend on one group to handle the necessary heavy lifting to prevent a repeat of the financial and operational chaos the system just avoided. "I don't think this was a scare tactic either," Dickerson says. "We and 40 airports didn't think safety should have been politicized. We won the battle but the war continues." Jennifer Imo, executive director of the General Aviation Airport Coalition, which claims over a hundred general aviation airports as members, says, "Airport managers should be assessing all of their options right now. They should be calling their congressional delegations to advocate for continued federal funding for the contract tower program in FY June/July 2013 airportbusiness 27