Tower at McKellar-Sipes Regional Airport Slated for Closure Due to Budget Cuts
The FAA has released its list of air traffic control towers they plan to close in April as a result of cuts required by the sequestration. Among the closures planned are two in West Tennessee including the tower at McKellar-Sipes Regional Airport. The other tower closing in the area is in Millington. In early March, FAA proposed to close 189 contract air traffic control towers as part of its plan to meet the $637 million in cuts required under budget sequestration and announced that it would consider keeping open any of these towers if doing so would be in the national interest. According to an email from the FAA, “in addition to reviewing materials submitted on behalf of towers on the closure list, DOT consulted with the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted operational assessments of each potential tower closure on the national air transportation system. As a result, 24 federal contract towers will remain open because closing them would have a negative impact on the national interest. The FAA will begin a four-week phased closure of 149 federal contract towers beginning on April 7.” The U.S. Contract Tower Association sent out a news release Friday afternoon indicating their unhappiness with the closures. “Over the past few decades, the FAA has closed only a handful of air traffic control towers, yet the agency is now committed to closing 149 contract towers beginning on April 7,” USCTA Executive Director J. Spencer Dickerson noted. “Contract towers have long been an integral part of the FAA‘s system of managing the nation‘s complex airspace, and the decision to shutter these critical air traffic control facilities on such an unprecedented and wide-scale basis raises serious concerns about safety – both at the local level and throughout the aviation system.” Dickerson added that “Given the breadth and scope of the closures, the FAA cannot possibly fully understand the safety impacts, the operational impacts or the immediate and long-term economic hardships this decision will have on affected airports and communities. While we understand and appreciate the challenges associated with implementing budget cuts resulting from sequestration, the decision by the Administration to disproportionately target the contract tower program represents a regrettable deviation from the role the FAA has always played as a guardian of aviation system safety.” Earlier this month, WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News spoke with Steve Smith, executive director of the Madison County Airport Authority, who said these cutbacks will cost thousands of air traffic controllers their jobs. He also said the responsibility of taking off and landing a plane safely will fall solely onto pilots. “What we’ve taken for granted is the guys in the tower telling us if there’s a problem or if there’s an alert. We’re now going to have to find that out for ourselves now,” Smith said. We will have more on this story tonight on WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News at 6 and 10.
