Palomar Airport: FAA Due Diligence, Part X, 163

The term Go big or go home means Try your best or don’t try at all. As seen last week, local airports Go big when applying for FAA grants. But Go Small when trying to objectively justify them.

You would expect the FAA to reject airport economic studies without waiting for local residents to flag flaws. Unfortunately, the FAA seems willing to accept fatally flawed analyses until public pressure hits it. See last week’s article discussing the Chicago O’Hare airport economic “benefit” debacle – and the FAA’s deer in the headlights oversight.

The FAA Military-like Analysis Process

How and why does the FAA seemingly accept shoddy, self-serving local airport expansion cost and benefit analyses?

Recall the decades-old Pentagon excesses of $640 toilet seats, $660 ashtrays, $7,600 coffee-makers, and $74,000 ladders. (See The Long, Expensive History of Defense Rip-Offs, A timeline of more than 230 years of military waste, from gouging George Washington to ditching $7 billion worth of stuff Afghanistan by Eric Wuestewald Wed Dec. 18, 2013, MotherJones.com.)

No, the FAA is not military. But its unjustified reliance on factually unsupported local airport economic analyses leads to military-like Sasquatch expenditures.

The FAA McClellan-Palomar (Palomar) Evaluation Test

In 2013 county predicted growing the Palomar runway from 4900 to 5700 feet would produce revenues exceeding construction costs. Why? Because then 40% of corporate flights could fly farther. Increased aviation fuel taxes would pay for the runway.

As noted last week, whether the county taxes aircraft fueling for long-distance flights at Lindbergh or Palomar does not increase the taxes. So county’s argument fails immediately. More reasons an objective FAA review of the Palomar Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) should find the county’s alleged support for a runway expansion lacks credibility include those below.

• Need. Aircraft now being designed and built can fly farther, carry more passengers, and land and take off on Palomar’s existing runway. See the Bombardier C Series and Mitsubishi regional jets discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CSeries and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Regional_Jet.

• Faulty County Assumptions. Many reasons suggest that few future aircraft leaving Palomar will fully fuel for international flights. Reasons include: (1) most Palomar flights involve intra U.S. travel; (2) many very long distance flights require refueling even if an aircraft left Palomar fully fueled, often in Anchorage, Alaska; (3) many corporate flights have nonfuel reasons to stop before heading overseas, such as to pick up other corporate executives not already in California; (4) fuel prices will often be lower outside California; (5) many aircraft using Palomar have limited geographic ranges even when fully fueled; (6) technology daily minimizes the need for business international flights as videoconferencing, email document transmission, and the recent addition of 3-D printers allows executives to complete business from their offices; and (7) San Diego International Airport is a mere 30 miles away.

No doubt a few corporate executives using Palomar monthly for international flights would like the FAA and county to spend $50+ million on a longer runway. But the FAA could no doubt better spend that money on safety improvements at Lindbergh and at the 8 San Diego county airports, including Palomar, to benefit the many, not the few – and reduce the noise and traffic congestion that Carlsbad’s 2015-2035 General Plan already predicts will gridlock Palomar Airport Road and El Camino Real.

When the FAA receives Freedom of Information Act requests to disclose whether the FAA investigated the above issues, what will the FAA analysis show?