173 ATC Towers to Close

On 3/5/2013 7:26 PM, Steve wrote:

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to
ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with
only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2)
providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget
were cut, what would it do?
The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications
for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get
the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of
Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of
Benedict Arnold in the first place.

The example was deliberately extreme as an illustration. But, in the
real world, the same general pattern can be seen in local, state and
national government responses to budget cuts.

The above is from a recent column by Thomas Sowell.

Since this *is* RAS, after all, just to "keep this thread legal," thanks for
this spot-on, illustrative - yea, soaring? - word picture of a form of reality
with which every soaring pilot must interact!

Bob == == W.

This is not quite right. This list was announced before the sequester as a list of POSSIBLE closures. Says so right at the top.

The actual list of closures hasn't yet been announced, as far as I know. It will be about half of these.

On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 4:38:04 PM UTC-6, John Carlyle wrote:
The sequester is hitting ATC towers. Here's the story from CNN:

Here's a list of the 173 towers to be closed:

http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/medi..._Be_Closed.pdf

On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 3:38:04 PM UTC-7, John Carlyle wrote:

Here's a list of the 173 towers to be closed:

Well, to be precise, it's a list of towers that COULD be closed - the list has around 216 towers listed. It's more likely a list of low-use or contract towers. FAA would choose 173 from the list.

I like the way the story says some planes "need control towers to land". With TCAS (and in the future, ADS-B, maybe)the need for a tower at a little-used airfield is reduced to ground control. So now the pilot has to do some of that "pilot sh!t", in the words of the immortal Goose!

I can just see a bunch of 787s (some trailing smoke due to minor battery problems...) and Barbie Jets duking it out in the pattern like a busy glider contest finish ("Land long, Delta, American is right behind you!").

Is this a great country or what!

Kirk
66 (for real now!)