FAYETTEVILLE — Pat Ross watches intently every time the tower calls, telling the student pilot in his single-prop Beechcraft that he’s entering a landing pattern along with a bigger, faster twin-engine jet.
“Their eyes get big, quick,” said Ross, who’s been giving flight instruction at Drake Field since 1994. “Imagine how nervous they’d get without the tower telling them about it. They might only get a few minutes’ warning from the jet pilot.”
Those calls from the tower will keep coming, at least until Sept. 30, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and Fayetteville officials.
Federal budget cuts had threatened to slash funding for the tower, but the deadline for those cuts was pushed back for a third time Friday, to the end of the federal fiscal year. The cuts were originally planned to take effect April 7, then June 15.
The announcement on Friday means the tower will continue to operate from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day, said Ray Boudreaux, airport director.
“I don’t know what will happen after Sept. 30, but for now, we’re in business as usual,” he said. “We were looking at having to cut back, probably to 12 hours, between 8 and 8.”
City officials were prepared to sign a contract to city reserve money to keep controllers in the tower for the rest of the year, but that contract has been shelved, at least until more is known about what action the FAA will take in the fall, said Kit Williams, city attorney.
The tower is manned by controllers employed by CI2 Aviation, a national controller group. The city contract would have kept the same controllers in charge, costing the city $50,000 to $60,000.
“If the FAA continues to make funding decisions based on their regular cost-benefit analysis formula, we’ll be funded again. But, if they throw that out, who knows how they’ll choose to pass out funding,” Boudreaux said.
Federal legislation says that the FAA cannot make a local government pay more than 20 percent of the cost of a tower. If the FAA isn’t willing to shoulder at least 80 percent of the cost, it’s possible the tower could be shut down next fiscal year.
“An uncontrolled field is something that pilots do deal with regularly, and it’s even possible to use them for instruction if there’s not a lot of other traffic around,” Ross said. “When you start mixing low-hour students with jets, military flights and other infrequent pilots, it gets dangerous without a tower. If they shut it down, I don’t think I could be comfortable basing instruction out of Drake anymore.”