Waypoints

AOPA Pilot Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines has been flying for more than 20 years.

Imagine you own a shopping mall and lease space in it to store owners. You manage the facility, take care of the parking lots, and make sure the lights stay lit. Every day customers come and go from your mall, making purchases in the stores.

One day, the police show up and install Jersey barriers at the entrances to your mall's parking lot. They can't say when or if your mall will ever open again. Have a nice day.

Substitute the word airport for the word mall in the above and you'll have an understanding of the situation facing a number of airport owners in suburban Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C., since September 11. Running an aviation business has always been precarious. You must operate on razor-thin margins in a low-volume business fraught with government regulation and located on a piece of property that is mostly unwanted by its neighbors. In fact, if you and your airport weren't there, a lot of community problems would go away. Never mind that you offer a gateway to the nation's air transportation system, a portal into a rapid emergency or medical transit network, open space, and are a magnet for enlightened companies that know they can be more productive by using general aviation aircraft.

Airports come in three flavors: publicly owned, public use (there are a few facilities that are publicly owned, private use — such as police helipads); privately owned, public use; and privately owned, private use. Typically you must obtain permission from the owner before landing at a privately owned, private-use airport. Most pilots fly to and from publicly owned, public-use fields, usually owned by a municipality or an airport board. These fields are eligible to receive federal grants for airside improvements through the Airport Improvement Program, with matching dollars coming from state and local governments. In most cases, privately owned airports are not eligible for federal grants.

So, as the private owner of an airport, whether for public use or not, all that you have to support your aviation obsession are the real estate you own and the supposed free access to the airspace above. Think of the airspace as the highway running by the entrance to your mall's parking lot. If someone shuts off the access, you're in peril.

Among those facing such a situation since September 11 are the owners of Potomac Airfield, a once-thriving privately owned, public-use facility southeast of Washington Reagan National Airport just outside the nation's capital. Located seven miles from National, Potomac's 2,700-foot runway lies deep inside the 25-mile temporary flight restriction area that prohibited all Part 91 operations after the September attacks. Weeks after the attacks, limited IFR operations were permitted between 18 and 25 miles from National, New York, and Boston, which doesn't help Potomac a bit.

David Wartofsky, one of the owners of Potomac, says he takes a certain pride in the fact that he has been told by high-level government officials that Potomac is the second most controversial airport in the United States — not third or fourth. "I find some satisfaction in having that distinction, don't you?" queries Wartofsky in a recent newsletter to pilots. The most controversial airport, at least for the first few weeks after the attacks, was National itself.

Wartofsky, who bills himself as "Big Cheese — Potomac Airfield," uses his newsletter as a venue for his fun and philosophizing. Despite the fact that his airport and its tenants have been shut down for months, he maintains his humor. A few pilots whose airplanes are trapped at the airport have asked what he intends to do about the situation. "Time to double the rents!" he declares.

"Our airport isn't closed at all. We've never closed. You just can't get in or out. We can taxi around all we want."

Wartofsky and a partner purchased the airport in 1987, renaming it from PG Airpark to Potomac Airfield because the new name sounded more romantic. "An airfield ought to be more like a country club or a marina — a place where you go to enjoy yourself. You go to an airport to come and go from someplace. We wanted this to be something different," Wartofsky explains. He runs the airfield much like a shopping mall owner. He provides the facilities for his tenants, but he prefers not to operate the businesses themselves because he doesn't want to compete with the tenants. His philosophy apparently worked, at least until the attacks. The airport, which is home to about 120 airplanes, supports two flight schools, two maintenance facilities, and a host of other aviation-related businesses. Any pilot can join the fuel club for $18 a month. Members have access to the self-serve fuel island where they pay only $1.69 per gallon for fuel. "Half of the club members are from other airports," he says, which is good for the other service businesses on the field. Since the airport has been shut down, he has stopped collecting rent from the business tenants.

A few Washington elite started the airport in the 1940s. It later was home to an Army flying club and supposedly was a preferred courier route for CIA operatives during the Cold War. To this day, the airport hosts an odd assortment of businesses that cater to the darker side of the federal government. "Our office building has more antennas than a Russian fishing boat," Wartofsky admits. During the one weekend since the attacks when aircraft owners could move (or, in FAA parlance, flush) their airplanes to outlying open airports, a state policeman was checking drivers' licenses of those about to launch from Potomac on the highly structured routes out of the area. "I'd guess some 80 percent of our tenants hold security clearances," says Wartofsky, who thought it odd that guys with White House clearances had to show their drivers' licenses.

Wartofsky is an admitted gadget freak. One of his companies invented the SuperUnicom, which automatically broadcasts weather information while simultaneously acting as a conventional unicom — it will acknowledge a radio check and even greet you with a cheery "good morning" when appropriate. One of the primary purposes for the airport is as a research and development tool for technology. Embedded in the run-way is a camera positioned so that it can record the N number of landing aircraft. It is a system in development that may one day be sold to municipalities that charge landing fees, allowing them to automatically bill landing aircraft owners rather than having someone in the tower or at the FBO record the information.

The Big Cheese started his first high-tech biomedical company when he was a teenager. He was the CEO by age 18, which is also when he got his helicopter rating. "I knew it would impress the girls, why else?" Today, he owns a Cessna Skymaster and uses it to commute to a beach house next to a runway on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

Like most small airports, particularly in suburban areas, Potomac faces its share of threats. A housing development off the end of the runway has not surprisingly turned into a bad idea. Wartofsky explained it succinctly in a newsletter. "Potomac Airfield has been a zoning-approved, airport land-use since 1965. In 1992 the homeowners bought their houses for a lower price because they were off the end of the runway; the developer had every buyer sign a 'hold-harmless and waiver agreement for all hazards associated with being adjacent to an airport.' Some of the homeowners don't like these facts and never will."

Of course, one of the homeowners quickly filed suit against the airport, or as Wartofsky puts it, the homeowner "elected to try out his newly minted law degree and has filed a silly, but at least amusing, lawsuit against the airport." The homeowner claims the airplanes are "flying over his house without his permission, causing vibration, etc." Wartofsky says the homeowner is seeking the usual $1 million and "has already probably picked out the color of his new Jaguar."

On the bright side, the neighbors haven't complained at all since the airport has been shut down. Wartofsky shrugs it off: "That's just part of being an airport located within a metro area."

As for the current shutdown, the entrepreneur keeps plugging away at his agenda to educate the public about small airplanes and continues his work with government bureaucrats to come up with operating parameters that will satisfy security officials. At this writing, he is ever confident that the airport will reopen imminently. If it and the other close-in Washington, New York, and Boston airports affected by the shutdown don't reopen, we will have lost some of the best entrepreneurs aviation has to offer at a time when we can least afford to lose them.

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