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John Eiff had a problem familiar to many: satisfying ever-increasing expenses with a fixed income. Compounding his predicament was the prospect that outside entities could soon overwhelm the already delicate situation.
As manager of DeLand Municipal Airport in Central Florida, Eiff is championing a proposal to help ensure the facility’s continued viability. That decision has caused a commotion.
Thanks largely to its balmy weather, flat terrain and numerous public-use airports—including DeLand’s—the Sunshine State is a flight-training mecca. Among the important procedures in those thousands of training flights are touch-and-go landings.
Of the 120,000 traffic movements logged at DeLand Municipal annually, 70% are training flights; a very small portion involves aircraft based there. Most visiting trainers buy no fuel or maintenance services—not even a burger at either of the airport’s two restaurants.
Thus, Eiff says, although transients use the facility “relentlessly,” they contribute nothing to its financial well-being. Rather, DeLand’s income is derived from two main sources: ground leases from the airport’s businesses and 115 T-hangars and the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program (AIP).
While the AIP contributes $150,000 annually to his operation, Eiff notes that that figure has been static for 30 years. Meanwhile, the cost of maintenance, supplies, administration and such has steadily increased. Consequently, he says, “We’re desperate for funding.”
Moreover, he believes many area airports plan to impose landing fees. If they do, he says training aircraft could “overwhelm” DeLand unless it follows suit.
Historically, general aviation airports typically abstained from such fees, since traffic supported fuel sales and other services. In addition, keeping tabs on landing aircraft, then identifying and invoicing owners, was a complicated, imprecise and labor-intensive process.
However, rising expenses and technology—notably, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)—are combining to loosen self-restraint. While primarily intended as an air traffic control (ATC) aid, aircraft ADS-B transmissions of position and related data, including identification, can be captured, tracked and recorded by equipment available to third parties. And they are, for a variety of non-ATC applications. For example, the recorded tracks can confirm or disprove airport noise complaints (AW&ST Jan. 16-29, 2023, p. 12). They can document usage by various aircraft types and justify the case for lengthening a runway, adding a taxiway, extending service hours and more.
Virtower provides such data to its customer base of state and federal offices and 410 publicly owned airports, which in turn use the information to justify those projects. Les Goldsmith, who founded the Fort Myers, Florida, company, reports that its data has helped customers obtain $2 billion in project funding since 2020.
Of course, this sort of tracking capability by Virtower and others is being applied to another funding source—namely, aircraft operators landing at airports that impose ADS-B-enabled fees. Hence the commotion noted earlier.
The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association and the Experimental Aircraft Association are prominent opponents to this new wave of landing fees. They argue that airports like DeLand’s are supported with public funds through the AIP. Further, they note that in 2020 the FAA required owners to install ADS-B systems in their aircraft at their own expense to facilitate ATC handling in certain airspace, and they argue that commercial activity should not profit from that order.
In addition, they warn that implementing landing fees at general aviation airports could inhibit touch-and-go landing practice, thereby compromising flight safety. Accordingly, they are appealing to governments—local, state and federal—to prohibit such action. Doing so could jeopardize the future of some facilities, however. Thanks to ADS-B’s identification precision, compromises can be made regarding the application of new fees.
Texarkana Regional Airport, for example, imposes a landing fee of $2 per 1,000 lb. of aircraft gross weight. Executive Director Paul Mehrlich says his Arkansas facility welcomes light plane activity and consequently levies the fee only on aircraft weighing 12,500 lb. or more and still generates $7,200 per month.
DeLand Municipal welcomes all comers, too, but Eiff considers it unfair to burden the airport’s tenants—but not transients—with its expenses when they account for less than a third of its usage. That is why he is promoting the implementation of a fee of $3 per 1,000 lb. on all landing aircraft—notably waiving it for every arrival’s first landing of the day.
He plans to put forward the plan when the City Council next takes up the issue.
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