Earlier this week I wrote about an upcoming meeting that City officials were planning to have with officials from the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC). We had the meeting on Tuesday. I promised a follow-up blog entry about the meeting. Here it is.
It was a very positive and productive meeting. I think we learned a lot about the current management and future development of Flying Cloud Airport (FCM). For those of you unfamiliar with Flying Cloud Airport, it is a MAC owned and managed reliever airport located on 800+ acres within the city of Eden Prairie.
Here’s a sampling of the issues we discussed:
1. We learned how the MAC enforces the voluntary restrictions on landings and take-offs at FCM between the hours of 11pm and 6am. If the MAC receives a complaint about a landing or take-off during the restricted time period, the airport manager figures out who the offending pilot is and sends the pilot a letter that informs the pilot of the complaint, reminds the pilot of the voluntary restriction, and asks the pilot not to violate the restriction again. So far, no pilot that has received the letter has recorded a second violation. We also learned from the MAC that 50% of the reported landings or take-offs that violate the voluntary restriction are for Life Flight flights heading out to pick up a human organ somewhere and bring it back to the Twin Cities for an organ transplant operation in a Twin Cities hospital. We’re not going to get in the way of that kind of flight at FCM. I can promise you that.
2. The 2002 Final Agreement between the City and MAC that allowed MAC’s plans for the development and improvement of the airport to move forward also contained a provision that is designed to discourage the owners of heavy/noisy aircraft from basing them at the airport. The provision gets at this issue by targeting the weight bearing capacity of the runways. The provision seeks to limit airplanes weighing over 60,000 pounds from using the runways based on the fact that the runways were not constructed to regularly accommodate aircraft weighing more than 60,000 pounds. Of course, the runways could accommodate an occasional landing or take-off of an airplane of that size, but not on a regular basis. There are some citizens in Eden Prairie who believe that this provision is not strong enough in our Final Agreement and that MAC will not enforce it. MAC officials told us the provision is desirable from their view and defendable with the FAA. They committed to defend the provision if it is ever challenged by a recalcitrant pilot.
3. The Final Agreement also contained a provision that gave the City new access and use rights to excess land that surrounds the airport. The City wanted this land to develop new parks and recreation facilities, primarily soccer and baseball fields. Northwest Airlines challenged this provision of the agreement because they felt that the MAC was not getting enough money or concessions from the City to justify their transfer of the land to us for public recreational use. Northwest Airlines’ challenge of this provision has held up the City’s plan to develop the land. We don’t want to put almost $1,000,000 into developing the land only to have the FAA or a court tell us to vacate it. The MAC officials gave us some advice on how to pursue the issue through the FAA. We’re going to do that.
There’s a lot more I could write about, but it would exceed the length of a typical blog post. If you’re a resident of Eden Prairie, you can read more about our meeting in the local newspapers. If you’re not a resident of our fair city, look for more comments about the City’s relationship with the MAC in this blog. I’ll get back to this sometime.
Enjoy your Labor Day holiday weekend. Drive safely, if at all.
