"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
ups.com...
I began flying in the days when FSS were scattered all across the
country.

I've heard that there were Flight Service Stations at virtually every
medium-or-better-sized airport in America at one time. True? I
know Iowa City had one.

Just curious: What paid for them? Gas taxes? Were they eliminated by
technology, or did they just price themselves out of existence with
high wage demands?

El Dorado AR (ELD) had one through the mid '80s and it is a small airport.
They were great. The next best thing to having a tower. For someone learning
to fly they were better in a lot of ways. You didn't have to follow their
instructions but they were more than happy to give you traffic that had
called in and their approximate location and would warn you if there was
someone they knew was NORDO in the pattern or on the ground. They also had
DF equipment so the young student pilot who misplaced themselves while
practicing maneuvers could quickly, request a practice DF and be headed back
in the general direction of the airport. They also took all the weather
reports and posted them.


Uncle Sam paid for them the same way he pays for the FSS now. And technology
is what killed them it just became cheaper to consolidate them. In El Dorado
it was a done in phases. First the briefers went away and they hired guys to
come in and do the weather report duties then they did away with them and
replaced them with automated equipment.

ELD's switch to automation was accelerated by a year or two when the 23 year
old kid that was doing the night shift got caught with a cooler full of beer
and 6 friends, 3 of which were underage females in various states of
undress, in the "tower."