Airpark Officials See No Need for a Tower

Officials have veered away from building a control tower to oversee the Montgomery County Airpark, the county's only general-use airport.

The Montgomery County Revenue Authority, which owns and operates the airpark in Gaithersburg, had considered a control tower last year as a way to persuade the Federal Aviation Administration to ease restrictions imposed by a federal security ring around Washington. Pilots traveling within the 30-mile Air Defense Identification Zone must register flight plans and be monitored by the FAA.

The zone was redrawn last year to include the airpark, and the FAA rejected a request to carve out a corridor for it. But those changes, which went into effect in August 2007, have proven to be less of a burden than anticipated, said Keith Miller, executive director of the revenue authority.

"We don't have any control tower in our eyes at all," Miller said. "Really, the changes that the FAA ended up making with the ADIZ ended up being very user-friendly. Users of the airport have commented that it has happened very seamlessly."

Talk of a control tower alarmed some of the airpark's neighbors, particularly in the East Village community of Montgomery Village. They worried that a control tower would open the way for more air traffic at the single-runway airport. The airpark is home to 200 planes and logs 100,000 takeoffs and landings every year.

Although neighbors have expressed relief that there won't be the increase in traffic they believed would come with a tower, they still have concerns about expansion, more flights and pilots flying too low.

Unable to get any residents onto the county's airpark liaison group, East Village's board of directors established its own committee to offer proposals.

"The majority of the pilots coming out of there maintain a satisfactory [flight] pattern altitude," said Bob Anderson, a committee member and longtime pilot. But some of them, he added, are flying too low, particularly on a specific turn mandated after takeoff.

"As often as not, they're flying at less than 1,000 feet over our homes," Anderson said. "We're trying to work with the airpark as far as that problem. It's been a long time developing, so it's not going to be solved overnight. The process is slow as always, but we're optimistic."

Meanwhile, federally mandated safety improvements are gradually coming together. In 2002, the FAA agreed to give the Montgomery Revenue Authority about $30 million to clear the "runway protection zone" as part of a 20- to 30-year Airport Layout Plan, which will require acquisition of several abutting parcels of land and installation of new runway lights.

The airpark has received slightly more than $5.2 million of that funding, according to revenue authority records. The slow disbursement of the funds is due in part, Miller said, to delays in congressional budget approvals.

"We're still in kind of a hiatus," he said. "Overall, the FAA has continued to be very supportive. It's just a matter of balancing all that."

In the coming months, the revenue authority will buy the state Motor Vehicle Administration emissions testing facility and two small parcels on what is known as the Webb Tract, which abuts the airpark.

Acquisition of a few private businesses on Beechcraft Avenue, which breach the "runway protection zone," will probably come next year, Miller said. The FAA must pay 95 percent of relocation costs for the displaced businesses, with the rest split between the Maryland Aviation Administration and the revenue authority.