Small Planes and Big Jobs

Gary E. Hart’s commentary, “Aviation’s Oft Maligned ‘Small Planes’ Often Fly Off to Do Big Jobs” (Sept 24), makes some valid points but is also quite misleading. He lumps together the corporate jets and the small two-to-six-place single- and twin-engine prop craft.

That is misleading. The term general aviation does indeed include all civil flight operations other than airline flights. The term is obsolete but still is foisted upon us by the FAA. Sophisticated aircraft such as Learjets are built and certificated to the same rigid FAA rules as are DC-9s and 747s. These corporate twin-jets are required to have two pilots who are usually trained to standards meeting or exceeding those maintained by major airlines.

On the other hand, smaller prop craft with twin or single engines are built and dcertificated under much less rigorous FAA rules. Some of the aircraft are carefully maintained and used for important reasons cited by Hart, such as medical, agriculture, and wildlife and other surveying. But the vast majority of these aircraft are used to either train pleasure pilots or for pleasure flights themselves. Many such craft are marginally to poorly maintained and many private pilots are semi-competent at best. Sure, there are some very prudent and competent private pilots, but they are a minority of that population.

There is only so much smoggy airspace available above the Los Angeles/Orange County basin. There are too many aircraft using this airspace, especially on weekends. Any analogy with the number of cars on the freeways is irrelevant: Each plane needs quite a bit of the sky to itself in order to operate safely. Air traffic control rules in metropolitan locales should require positive separation of all aircraft at all times.

Eventually, government should limit operations at airports such as John Wayne, not by the size of the craft but by the purpose of the flight. In that way, Hart’s small craft doing “big jobs” would be protected while eliminating the often incompetent “pleasure” pilots from our smoggy, overcrowded skies.

WALLACE B. ROBERTS

San Clemente