Today, the Palm Beach Post (in my personal opinion, an excuse of a newspaper, but to each his own) put out an editorial against proposed and studied airport "expansion" at Palm Beach International Airport (PBI/KPBI). Now, my readers know my stance. People who move somewhere and ask (okay, maybe not ask, more like DEMAND) that an airport either edit its reason to exist, if not make it cease to exist, for their own personal benefit. I don't need to go over it again.
An airport that has been bullish in its growth should not stop. Airports should reach their full potential. Nobody has any reason to live close to an airport if they're just going to complain about it all day. Take the good with the bad, like everything else in life (good for me, I like airplane noise...it's comforting to me, and ask any pilot and they will agree).
So when people are trying to subversively fight against an airport, and try to designate certain neighborhoods near airports (that came into existence and grew into existence AFTER the airport was there), like the Vedado neighborhood trying to have the county designate it as a historic area (thus preventing the airport, or any other government entity for that matter "interfere" with the area), you know that they're up to something.
This "newspaper" also alleges that the airport reached its peak traffic level in 1990, but never went further than that. So, has it gone up or down? How much so? Enplanements, incoming and outgoing traffic, where are the numbers? Why won't you say what the FAA says? Because it's against your agenda! That's why!
Some will blindly say, they're trying to save their homes. But against what? Something that was already there from before they were born? Something that was there from before their houses were built? Something that already has eminent domain over them? It's like building a house near a mountain that is prone to avalanches and mudslides. Are you going to call the county and tell them they need to fix the mountain? Of course not! You probably would reconsider the build site, if even build AT ALL! That's the smart way to do things! But no, people like to bury their heads in the sand when they see that an airport desperately needing improvement is asking a helping hand.
Even Donald Trump, owner of the Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach (about a mile from the departure end of PBI's Runway 9R), is making raucous about the noise. And he himself is a "contributor" to the noise! He flies his 727 into PBI all the time (and speak of the devil, when I drove to work today, I saw his 727 sitting at Jet Aviation in PBI. His jet isn't even registered in the United States. And his jet is an older one, with noisier engines that people especially complain about. He, of all people, should be the LAST to complain about it, because he has one of the largest private planes that fly into PBI, and one of the noisiest of all aircraft that fly there.
Remember. Ask not what aviation can do for you. Ask what you can do for aviation!
You can view the proposal from the FAA here.
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