Skydive Laconia?

[TheNoonans]

"FAA received over 80 comments from interested parties. The majority of these comments stated that this proposal presents a major safety concern to pilots and airport users".

As I reference above, if we wanted to flood the comment process with "interested parties", we could have provided 800 favorable comments. We left it alone. Wasn't needed (and still isn't).

As a side note, "interested parties" does not dictate "local" interested parties. The LAA is attempting to reach as many people as they can, even outside the Laconia/Gilford area.

More importantly though, "interested parties" does not constitute "educated parties". If I was living in the region and bought into all the scare tactics that have been posted, I'd be concerned to.

Concern can actually be a good thing, it indicates people are actually thinking about it. We are all for that, support it 100%.

The issue though is education versus concern.

Let me give the community here an example to ponder. A factual verifiable example:

Back in 2008 Mary and I were coming up to the meeting with the LAA where we were going to formally address the LAA and request permission to land on the airport. As required, we provided the airport manager and the LAA with all of our supporting documentation, a 40+ page packet of info a month prior to the meeting. Now about a week prior to the meeting, the airport manager sent out an email to the list of local pilots and property owners on the airport forewarning them that a couple was coming up to request to land parachutes on the airport. The email went on to say that we were bringing an entourage with us, people to support our cause. The email went on to encourage local attendance so that these people on the email list could have their say as well.

We would have been thrilled about that, except one thing was missing from the email:

Any reference to the volume of information we provided.

Why would you send out a "call to action" so to speak to the local pilots and hangar owners you are supposed to be serving without letting them know you have a volume of information provided by the proposed business owners that they can research and educate themselves with prior to the meeting?

The answer: Unfortunately, they didn't want you educated at that meeting because it's easier to create panic and chaos that way. Do you think people showed up to that meeting boiled up? Yup. Of course they did, they knew nothing about us, other than that we were outsiders and we were bringing an entourage. (In a way those of you that showed up without being given access to that information ahead of time were being used as pawns by the LAA unfortunately. They were looking for your hysteria, not your educated input.)

Now if it were me and I wanted to make sure everyone was educated, I would have sent out the same email, but INCLUDED that the Airport Manager had the entire proposal including FAA and AOPA documents that were available for the local pilots and hangar owners to study prior to the meeting.

That didn't happen.

I would even go so far as to let the proposed business owners know what I was doing and ask if they would be willing to answer questions from these people.

That didn't happen either. We got a copy of the email privately about a month later. Wonder why they excluded us from that "call to action"? Wait, I know, they're not "legally obligated" to let us know these things........

Is that the transparency that you, the community are willing to accept from your airport authority and it's management?

The irony is..........they had no problem giving our proposal to the Selectmen of Gilford last month.........yet it was purposely withheld from you when it mattered most, at the outset of this process.

Back to the current concerns. Did you know that both FBOs have Bill's "Skydive Laconia" photo on their office windows at the Main Terminal building showing a tandem pair about to collide with a jet? This despite the fact that in the 28 year history of tandem jumping, a tandem pair has never collided with any aircraft, let alone a jet. If I was a local pilot and I walked by that photo for 2+ years, I'd have concerns too.

Fear mongering, plain and simple. And these are supposed to be professional establishments.

Blue skies to all and to all a good flight,
Tom