A new month is approaching, and residents along the Front Range are continuing to be heavily impacted by excessive flight training.
In the last decade, there has been a big push for consolidation of flight schools. Private Equity is investing in these businesses, and making extra profits by concentrating activities to just a few airports. So, if you happen to live near an airport that draws its students from across the nation and even from Asia and Europe, FAA and industry players feel this is just your poor luck. The schools (and elite investors) are happy, and FAA does a great job enabling this concentrated abuse, while staying mum and not advocating for any balance or mitigation or justice.
This year, is proving to be horribly impactful for people near two towered airports south and west of Denver: Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (KBJC), and Centennial Airport (KAPA). This Post provides the latest compilations of monthly operations data for each airport, from January 2017 through September 2023. October’s data is not available until late November, due to FAA delays in sharing data they are fed by all towers every night; also delayed if your local airport authority refuses to get the data from the local tower, and share it ahead of important meetings. So, when monthly airport meetings come up, those concerned citizens who attend are handicapped for lack of current and timely data.
Wouldn’t it be nice if FAA advocated on behalf of the resident population, by urging (or even requiring, as an obligation to receive federal grant monies?) airport authorities to post timely data online ASAP, ahead of events where citizens can engage? Wouldn’t it be nice….
For KAPA, the September 2023 operations changes (versus September 2022) are:
- Itinerant: down 2%
- Local: up 41%
- TOTAL OPS: up 17%
For KBJC, the September 2023 operations changes (versus September 2022) are:
- Itinerant: up 15%
- Local: up 9%
- TOTAL OPS: up 11%
Click on this link to download the KAPA ops data, or this link for the KBJC ops data.
20231030.. ATADS monthly 2017-2023 cn42KAPA
20231030.. ATADS monthly 2017-2023 cn42KBJC
Scroll over the PDF above to activate the PDF viewer controls at the bottom; page-scroll with the arrows in the bottom left corner, or use +/- to zoom in/out.