PPR in the US

The situation in Las Vegas has become completely bizarre, in particular for the F1 car racing event: the article didn’t mention the $3000 landing fee required to buy/bribe a landing clearance at a public airport!

A large fee to ‘control volume of landings’ (and OBTW make a lot of money on their FAA ‘regulated’ airport monopoly) is outside of the conditions of their Federal funding grant, regardless of demand. Runways, ATC and public parking (of which there is tens of acres at KHND) are not for profit businesses like the on-site FBOs that cater to jets and others willing to pay for non-essential services. The situation is attracting a lot of negative attention and I suspect FAA will act when forced to do so. AOPA hasn’t said anything public that I’ve read (which is not the normal situation) so I’d guess that they’re at work but hoping for a quiet low cost legal resolution against a very well funded opponent. The Feds are probably the only organization with enough money and power to beat Vegas and I’d suppose AOPA is working Congress, which should then lean on FAA to assert the authority they bought with airport grants funded by the taxpayer.

Truly nuts.

As an European pilot, this doesn’t surprise or shock me at all. A few weeks ago I shared with the forum the £3,500 quote to land a Cirrus in Edinburgh. That’s not for an event but all year around.

When demand is high, GA is the first to sent away from airports. Then you have the opposite like what happened in Carlisle – designed for commercial operations and now begging GA to be back.

The airport situauon in the US and Europe is in no way comparable on almost any level. The fundamental issue for US airports is that they are almost all Federally funded by the national taxpayer, including Federal grants that bought the land, annual maintenance grants and free-to-the airports FAA ATC. Airports are thereby a regulated monopoly that accepts severe limits on charging landing fees or public parking fees. US public airports are not for-profit businesses. Conversely, commercial operators on the airport property (FBOs) are not Federally funded and do not face the same restrictions, but their services are generally optional and at least at some level in competition with other commercial businesses.

The three Las Vegas airports are all managed by the same local government (County), using money from the Federal government and somewhat unusually the County also operates some of the FBOs: at Henderson ((KHND) they run almost the whole show. The issue in Vegas is that the County has seemingly forgotten the distinction in the rules between managing three public airports in an FAA-regulated monopoly and managing a commercial FBO on airport property. No one has an issue with private FBOs charging more on busy weekends. However by charging huge profit-making event fees for any use of County airports and not just for optional FBO services this becomes a local government money grab that could if tolerated have significant implications on GA’s future access to publicly-funded airports nationwide.

As someone who has flown a 172 into VGT and occasionally the other two for trade shows every year for 20 years (until Covid) I’m utterly gobsmacked by this news.

Visitor traffic at VGT for the CES (said by some to be the largest trade show in the US) had declined steadily until my Cessna was one of only a handful parked on the ramp for the show’s opening sessions (last there in 2020). CES parking in prior years featured high rollers like Larry Ellison in his warbird but more recently just a few ordinary guys like me. Maybe F1 generates a lot more GA traffic at the high end – perhaps. After this looney tunes escapade, who knows.

If this was in UK, they’d be manouvering to build houses on the land. Wake up America!

But wait, there’s more! Saint George in Utah (KSGU), about 100 miles away from Vegas is also getting in on the act! They state some vague ‘safety’ issue (can’t find the article right now) and have so far extended the NOTAM till the end of the year:

SGU 11/001 SGU RWY 01/19 CLSD EXC 24HR PPR 435-627-4081/435-703-0805 2311061300-2401010659

What is a bit surprising is the silence of AOPA on this nonsense, at least in public. They’re normally all over BS like that.

I have used SGU for Vegas as an escape from the jangling slot machines but it’s a long drive. Actually, I was the third a/c to land at the ‘New’ St. George and certainly the first Brit to land there on the morning that it opened. They have had big problems with subsidence and have had closures before. Perhaps this isn’t connected to F1 but PPR? Ugh!

It is odd that AOPA doesn’t seem to be doing much about this so far. It is not a good precedent.

For reference the closest unaffected options if you were forced to fly to Vegas on the F1 weekend would be Boulder City (BVU), which is 35 minutes from the ‘strip’ and likely to have an Uber nearby, or Jean (0L7) which is 33 minutes away.

A PPR system was in place in October at KAUS for the Austin F1 GP. It was already the case in 2012.
Seems standard practice for such events.