X45

At many busy commercial airports for pax jets GA significantly complicates pilots & ATC jobs?

Life would be less stressful & easier for pax jet pilots & ATC staff if GA used separate airports? This would be particularly true at older airports with shorter runways near cities? Safety would be improved as a result? I am referring to airports where B 737 & larger jets operate. How common is mixing of GA & large jets at busy airports?

Public Comments

1. Most GA uses smaller airports, since the smaller ones are more convenient to the cities they serve. Think about it, Atlanta Hartsfield, Orlando, Newark, JFK, Houston, all report delays, but all of the GA traffic uses the remote fields such as Peachtree Dekalb, Orlando Sanford, Teterboro-Morriston, Westchester, etc. You rarely hear of delays at airports where GA and commercial traffic share the runways. Raliegh Durham, Jacksonville, Charleston, St. Louis boast extremely smooth operations. Since all commercial flights are operated under IFR (instrument flight rules) the departure procedure is more time consuming. Most GA will depart under VFR. Many times, all thats required is a simple declaration of heading and intentions, and we are on our way. Some people witness a small GA plane pulling out in front of a commercial operation. We don't need to wait for a clearance time. The problem lies in the lack of enough runways and a congested departure and arrival schedule. Hope this helps out.
2. First thing, at busy airports they dont just allow aircraft to file a flight plan whenever they feel like it, you must acquire a time slot. Good luck getting a slot for a GA aircraft. Secondly, the air traffic isnt really what slows everyone down, the airspace at class B airports, the busiest kind, arent really that busy. You would be surprised by how unimportant they really are, There are plenty of places with runways just as long, and the traffic isnt really that bad. The last time I flew into one they were layed back enough to give us a practice no gyro asr approach, which is very demanding of the controller. Thirdly, no GA aricraft really want to fly into those airports, the auto traffic is terrible and we can go to much nicer airports much closer to where we want to go. Oh, and last thing, they will ALWAYS make a GA aircraft hold for commercial traffic, they would never make a jet go around for a GA aircraft, the GA aircraft only costs a few hundred bucks to hold for an hour, the jet costs that much per minute.
3. Actually many moderatly busy airports, with the exception of class B, actually like GA aircraft. Air traffic controlers get some of the basis of pay by the number of operations that they do, a small piper cub still counts in the traffic pattern increases the number of operations at that tower, which increasses the pay for that AT Controller. the problem is when the large airports are expiernecing their heavy workload times or "pushes" where is they are trying to maximize the amount of departures and arrivals of large jets under IFR. a small GA aircraft due to its speed addeds to the seperation problems for other aircraft and this is why some large busy airports will make them stay outside of their airspace until after the amount of scheduled ops have been reduced.
4. Life would be a lot less stressful if there were fewer RJs out there. GA, as large as it is in the US, is hardly a factor in airport congestion.
5. Its pretty common, and not much of a problem. And hey grumpy, RJs saved this business. Those of us who fly them move people into hubs so they can connect with mainline aircraft and then get to their final destinations. Without us, those people would not be flying at all and the mainlines would have gone out of business years ago. That is unless you want to be the guy who starts up an airline that flies 757s from Boise to Little Rock 5 times per day. If you think you can sell 200 seats for that type of flight go ahead.