I see Whiteman in LA is due to close. IIRC one of the main reasons for a tower at Whiteman was a 737 headed to Burbank that called that he was on final @900 feet when he was lined up with Whiteman by mistake. :eek: The tower at Burbank realized that the 737 was not in sight and told him not to land.
It wasn’t long after that that Whiteman got a tower.
Now that San Fernando Air Park is closed, closing the tower at Whiteman will give students a close in location to practice on an uncontrolled field.
I’m in two minds about this. I used to fly out of an uncontrolled aerodrome in Australia that had approximately 100 movements per day and a mix of traffic from microlights of the powered hang-glider variety to Boeing 737s and everything in between. 100 movements isn’t really all that much, but a major problem was that it wasn’t spread evenly through the day but occurred in sporadic bursts concentrated around specific times. Early evening was when lots VFR scenic aircraft were arriving for example. I was flying Dash 8s and experienced everything from having the aerodrome all to myself to having to wait for 40 minutes on the ground with engines running while 20 aircraft all tried to arrive together. As well as the poor spread of traffic over the day, the other problem was the mix of types. If everyone is flying single engine Cessnas and Pipers it is fairly easy. If I can see your C172 flying at 120 knots then I can follow you in my Piper Warrior flying at 120 knots and maintain spacing with no great difficulty. On the other hand if I’m in a Dash 8 travelling at 240 knots, I don’t have as good visibility from the cockpit, I’m spending more time heads down because cockpit procedures require it, and when I do see you, I can’t fly slow enough to stay behind you, so it is much more complex trying to keep a mix of aircraft separated from each other.
There were many incidents around that aerodrome including gaggles of C172s doing a safari around the country blundering in to the airspace with no idea how it worked and not giving enough information on the radio for anyone to work out what was happening. I’ve flown through a loose formation of homebuilt RV6 aircraft that flew through the airspace without a word on the radio. I didn’t see them until they were passing me. I didn’t hit them because I was lucky.
I was very keen for the place to get both a control tower and some radar coverage. It eventually did get the Class D tower but no radar within 700 miles.
The tower experience was interesting. I certainly felt a lot safer with the tower providing separation for us, but on the other hand efficiency went right down. We were getting descent restrictions due to inbound traffic that was 60 miles away on the other side of the airfield. Cockpit workload went right up as we were spending a lot more time managing the autopilot to keep us flying at the appropriate levels. We were also talking more on the radio.
So I see uncontrolled airspace as having significant benefits and many airports can manage just fine with it, but if there is just one collision at an airport that had its tower closed, the FAA would be in deep shit.