По-долу е мнението на един човек, който според мен е много компетентен по въпросите на авиацията. Изпратено е до mailing-list, следователно е за публична употреба, но тъй като не съм питал автора изрично за неговото съгласие, предпочетох да не оставям името му.
За съжаление ме мързи да го преведа.
А, и пак за съжаление, не само в Калифорния е така. Във Флорида, съдейки по едно друго писмо, е горе-долу същото: "We have another group around here in the Florida Panhandle. We call them the "BANANA Republic" -- Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody. They stopped, among other things, an airport community at the Destin-Ft Walton Beach Municipal Airport."

А ето и самото писмо.
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With the various Clinton, Bush (Sr.) and prior base closures a number
of opportunities to relieve airport congestion have have been
squandered, thanks to the philosophize of NIMBY, NIABY,
faux-"environmentalism" or to plain greed.

Here in California, Hamilton Air Force Base with an excellent runway,
good buffer zone and approach and departure corridors unaffected by
housing sat idle for over 20 years while Marin County debated which
"Earth friendly" and "natural" use of the property would be best.
Eventually, what most cynics expected took place as some deft developers
got control of the property and built an upscale housing development.
The former Naval Air Station at Alameda had two recently rebuilt runways
and excellent hangarage and ramp space. Two of teh three apporach paths
and all of teh deparute paths were over water. Even the other apporach
path avoided most residential area and the final approach was over
industrial, shopping areas and an estuary. It would have made an
excellent corporate airfield, freeing up space at SFO and being close-in
to San Francisco and Oakland. It would also have provided much needed
revenue to Alameda, which is pretty much a bedroom community and could
have kept iany industrialization at its West end. Thanks to the Usu.al
Suspects, airfield is now just rotting.

Near where I live, the former Mather Air Force Base has survived so
far. This is in spite of the objections of people who moved in and
claimed they didn't know that an airport had been there for the last 84
years. It's been doing well as an airfreight and corporate jet center.
However, there are clouds on the horizin. The County Supervisors, who
never met a developer they couldn't grovel to, are allowing new housing
tracts to be built close in to the runway setting teh stage for noise
complaints and lawsuits. In addition, there is a push for a new school
in an extremely hazardous location relative to teh approach path. The
Educrats and Teachers' Union say that they aren't aviation experts, but
they know that approach patterns close-in acan just be changed to
accomdate the school. When asked if they would accept liability should
anything happen they reply that that's not their job. This situation is
developing.

The worst case, though, just happened in Orange County. For those who
aren't familiar, there are a lot of people there. People have built all
kids of things around their airport, John Wayne International. JWA has
a single 5,700 foot runway for commercial aircraft and a 2,887 general
aviation runway. It has amonst the most onerous noise abatment
restrictions in the country and is the only airport that has passneger
limits. It is constrained to half of its avaialbe capacity, which even
if those constrainst were lifted is insufficeint for the area now, let
alone in the future. Given the development around the area, it's
unlikely any of this will change.

As part of the '90s cutbacks, MCAS in Southern Orange County was
closed. It has two 8,000 foot runways and two 10,000 foot runways
(there's also a smaller fifth runway which was never expected to
reopen). There're ample space, aprons, fuel storage, freeway access,
infrastructure and other faciltiies in place to develop a world class
airport. In additon, there's one other extremely rare asset.
Surrounding the base's 4,700 acres is a 14,000 acre buffer area, teh
biggest one outside of DIA. It seemed likley that the Navy would
tranfer the base for use as an airport for Free. An airport was
expected to be profitable almost immediately and would throw off so much
money it could protect the buffer zone and allow it to be used for
parks, golf course, wildlife haibtats, etc.


However, in teh recent election, the forces of Deceit, Demagoguery,
Developers and just plain Dumbness (with some local greed) triumphed.
The South County voters voted to rezone the area and prohibit an
iarport. Some naively thought that it would all become a park, but
that's only 'cuase they didn't think about it. What they're going to
end up with is more taxes, industrial parks, office buildings,
landfills, housing, etc... It's already begun: A 6,000 home
development has already been announced immediately adjoing the base.
Since the base is not going to be an airport (barring a sudden outbreak
of common sense), teh Navy has announced that they are strongly
considering breaking up the proerty and selling it off to the highest
bidder. Since the military hasn't seen any savings from the other base
closures, teh half billion or so they could get from this would be a
nice chunk of change. Teh more cynical, of course, might think the fix
was in and that this course of action was orchestrated through political
pressure if the airport went down. It's happened before.

Althoughwe're in a temprary slump, air travel si going to come back.
All teh high-tech ATC systems aren't going to make much differnce if the
airport and runway capacity isn't there. When something this obvious
and logical doesn't "fly", things look pretty grim.


Art


P.S. On the other hand, we Are talking about California, so there may
be hope for the rest of you.