Here are just a few reasons why the Chicago Executive Pilots Association (CEPA) hopes the Prospect Height City Council will again vote to table the Executive Airport layout plan.
- Removing the airport’s runway 6/24 will create a bigger safety hazard than the one the airport is trying to fix.
- Since the unanimous vote on January 27, CEPA has reached out in writing to all parties with an interest in breaking the stalemate over the safety issues surrounding the closure of runway 6/24. Those parties included the PWK Executive Director, the Chairman of the Airport Board, all Board members, the Mayor of Prospect Heights, the entire Prospect Heights City Council, the Village President of Wheeling and all Wheeling Trustees. To date, not one party has responded to CEPA’s invitation.
- Some 2,200 pilots have signed a Change.org petition asking the airport to reconsider closing the runway. Nearly 750 of those signers are from the Chicagoland area.
- The communities have pointed out that many of the economic elements listed in the plan “will never happen,” making many parties wonder about the entire plan’s viability.
- CEPA recently contacted the FAA’s Great Lakes Regional Administrator over elements of the plan that the agency has a fiduciary right to understand before passing validating the airport plan. She is reviewing CEPA’s concerns and expects to soon offer the association and the two towns her take on the problems we’ve outlined.
- CEPA has also been in communication with the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Springfield about our concerns along similar lines to our outreach with the FAA. IDOT controls the purse strings to reimburse the airport for the master plan funding the airport seems to be so urgently seeking.
- IDOT responses indicate that while in some cases the airport team is being factual, in others, their responses do not meet the spirit of the regulations and are just vague enough to distort the actual facts behind the airport layout plan.
- CEPA recently met with a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who found the airport’s lack of transparency on elements of its airport layout plan of sufficient interest to warrant his offer to help the association in communicating with the FAA.
- Word of the airport’s decision to not only close runway 6/24, but their dismissal of all CEPA attempts to amicably discuss the outstanding runway safety issues has begun spreading through the aviation community. One large international aircraft owners group that planned to review Prospect Heights and Wheeling as a potential site for its 2021 convention last week eliminated Chicago Executive Airport and the two surrounding communities from its shortlist. That convention would have been worth between $825,000-1M in revenue to local businesses. That organization’s board said the airport’s stance on safety issues could affect future selection review as well.
- Because the airport control tower primarily assigns most traffic runway 16, most of the aircraft noise becomes concentrated in Wheeling. Closing runway 6/24 adds one more limit to the options the control tower might choose to channel some of that noise away from Wheeling and Prospect Heights.
- Again, removing the airport’s runway 6/24 will create a bigger safety hazard than the one the airport is trying to fix.