Viewpoint: Making Our Airports Fly
BELLEVILLE, IL (February 8, 2000) -- Time for an update on the aviation age of spending in the metro-east.
More government money is being spent to upgrade an airport in St. Clair County to help ease, congestion across the river at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
This time, it's not being spent at MidAmerica Airport, our county-owned airport that has yet to land a deal with an airline or cargo company two years after it opened for business.
This time, the government is dishing out $800,000 to St. Louis Downtown-Parks Airport, the airfield near Cahokia in the shadow of the Gateway Arch that has been growing for 20 years. The airport is upgrading pavement to handle more traffic and heavier planes. Parks generally caters to small planes and is handling nearly 200,000 take-offs and landings a year.
MidAmerica Airport handled 31,127 take-offs and landings in 1999, and 86 percent of those were military flights. MidAmerica handled only 4,290 general-aviation landings and take-offs last year - about 2 percent of Parks' traffic load. What's wrong with this picture? We'd like to know why MidAmerica Airport isn't getting some of those flights. We'd like to know why the federal government is so comfortable approving $60 million of your tax dollars to extend MetroLink to MidAmerica Airport while the airport isn't even sticking its toe into almost $1 million in general aviation business that already exists?
Well, of course, the county built MidAmerica Airport for major commercial aircrafts, not private jets that can weigh about 2 percent of what a Boeing 757 weighs. Airports base their landing fees on a plane's weight - anywhere from 90 cents to $1.10 per 1,000 pounds. If MidAmerica Airport attracted half of Park's small planes, the county would be bringing in about $200,000 a year. Not bad considering the terminal sees more traffic from cleaning crews than passengers.
Parks has more expansion projects in the works when more government grants are available. Who can blame it? It's in business to attract planes, not crawl into a hole now that MidAmerica Airport is here.
In the end, though, it's your money that is paying to make St. Clair County's airports fly.
By the way, we still unabashedly believe in MidAmerica Airport for future development.
And, sure, we can't wait to hop on MetroLink for the quick jaunt to MidAmerica Airport to jump on a budget flight for a weekend in Chicago or Florida. We're just anxious for all of our investments in the airport industry to start taking off.
Editorial Viewpoint provided by
the Belleville News-Democrat
February 8, 2000
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