Greetings,
My name is Tom Noonan, I am one half of the Skydive Laconia proposal. My wife Mary is the other half. I came across this forum and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to introduce myself and open up a dialogue with anyone that had any questions or concerns.
A brief background on who we are: I grew up in Boston and my wife in Syracuse, so we are both born and raised New Englanders at heart. Up until 2006, we lived in Southern New Hampshire, when we moved to Florida to pursue our aviation related careers. It is our love of New Hampshire and desire to return there that has led us to pursue a skydiving operation at the Laconia Municipal Airport.
From the beginning, we recognized the fact that our presence at the airport would alter the status quo of daily operations, and our goal from the beginning was to work with the airport authority to ensure our presence there would create as minimal a disruption as possible. We genuinely want to be good neighbors within the community.
With that said, we also realized that it was highly unlikely that 100% of the community would embrace our presence. We were pleased to see however that at the November 2008 LAA meeting that the vast majority of attendees genuinely did embrace our presence and wished us well. We have also met with a number of local community members outside the airport, and they too have supported and embraced our goal.
What we represent is the potential addition of 100s if not over 1000 additional tourist to the Weirs Beach/Laconia/Gilford area between April 1-October 31 each year. These additional tourists will be patronizing restaurants, hotels, gas stations and many other community destinations. We also represent new jobs. If given permission to operate, we intend to hire local community members to work with us. They will learn highly specialized skills such as parachute packing and aviation related office management, and eventually we hope to train local residents to become our future skydiving instructors. These specialized trade skills will allow them to literally travel the world if they choose to, enjoying a unique new perspective of "job satisfaction" as they sail through the sky. Basically, we feel we represent a potential boost to the local economy that will be felt across a broad spectrum of the community, not just the airport.
With that said, we realize that unless your in our sport, very few people will ever truly understand what it is that we propose to do and how we do it, and it is simply that lack of understanding that tends to cause negative reactions in some. We sincerely encourage anyone that has any questions or concerns to email us
the_noonans@yahoo.com, and we will do our best to reply to any and all questions.
We can certainly appreciate the original poster's question regarding "do YOU want people jumping out of planes above YOUR home?" To that I would answer that the probability of a skydiver crashing into someone's house is so remote that realistically you would be much more likely to ever have a plane crash into your house than a skydiver, yet we don't attempt to prevent aircraft from flying over residential areas. I can site numerous examples of aircraft "parking" themselves in people's homes unannounced, where as i cannot find a single instance of a skydiver crashing into someone's house. Another question that was raised in our November 2008 meeting was (as depicted in the above photo), the likelyhood of skydiver/aircraft collisions. I had to go back ten years to find two separate instances of these types of collisions, yet the NTSB states that there is an aircraft to aircraft collision every ten days in the US. Again, you are far more likely to ever have an aircraft to aircraft collision than you ever would a skydiver/aircraft collision, yet aircraft are not restricted from flying in the sky with each other. (Of the two skydiver aircraft collisions, both were skydivers and skydiving aircraft. One instance, everyone survived uninjured. In the other instance, the skydiver was killed, and the pilot, who survived, was violated by the FAA for negligence, flying a radical pattern rather than the predetermined one.) The truth is simply that the concern of skydiver/aircraft collisions at Laconia Municipal Airport is simply not a realistic concern based on all available evidence.
What the issue really comes down to is education. We expect people to question us and our proposal, and feel that if they truly listen to us with an open mind, they will see that our presence will create a minimal intrusion to the aviation landscape, while bringing a significant boost to the local economy.
If and when this proposal request gets resolved and we are given permission to operate, we invite the local community to come out and meet us and learn about what it is that we do. If you want to truly understand it, make a skydive with us, we'd be happy to show you our world in the sky.
We look forward to the completion of this application process and becoming good neighbors of the airport community and the surrounding areas. I will post here the next time we will be in the area for a future Airport Authority meeting, so that if you'd like to come out and meet us or have us answer any questions that you have.
Blue skies to all, and to all a good flight,
Tom Noonan
(P.S. - That really is a great picture in the original post, even from our side of the discussion, we can appreciate a good satire of our request. My wife and I both genuinely laughed when we saw it. Very well done.)