FAA Tells East Hampton 'Temporary' Airport Closure Has Issues, But Town Stays Course For Now

A Federal Aviation Administration official last week tried to throw a speed bump in East Hampton Town’s path for re-classifying East Hampton Airport at the end of this month by closing it down for three days — saying that it could take up to two years for the FAA to re-certify some of the “new” airport’s key operations.

Town officials said they will press ahead with their plans, nonetheless.

A letter from Marie Kennington-Gardiner, the FAA’s regional administrator for the Northeast, detailed a number of technical requirements that are necessary for “activating” an airport that could take months or years to complete and advised the town to reverse course.

Last month, the Town Board approved a plan to close the airport at midnight on February 28 and re-open it at 9 a.m. on March 4, declaring it a new, private airport that would require advance permission for aircraft to land. Doing so, the town has said, will allow it to better manage the volume and type of aircraft that use the airport.

The town has said that its intentions are for the airport to close just long enough to allow the legal designation to change and then reopen with no immediate difference in how aircraft may come and go. But by summer, it plans to impose new limits on flights, intended to reduce noise impacts on residential neighborhoods beneath flight paths.

Kennington-Gardiner said that would not be as easy as the town has made it sound.

“Once an airport is deactivated, it cannot be reopened with the same facilities and procedures simply by reactivating it,” the federal administrator wrote in her February 2 letter, “… Once the airport is deactivated, it could not immediately return to its prior operating status. While the FAA will endeavor to expedite its processes, you should be aware that it may take approximately two years to restore the current capability to the airport if it is deactivated depending on any potential environmental analyses.”

She said that the FAA had told the town this at a recent meeting with town officials. “We noted that this might not be the outcome you seek or desire and, if so, suggested that you reconsider the deactivation strategy,” Kennington-Gardiner wrote.

At a Town Board meeting on Thursday afternoon, February 3, East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc called the FAA official’s position “disingenuous” and an about-face from the advice the agency had been providing in meetings with town officials and their attorneys over the last year, as they negotiated the town’s decisions about the airport’s future.

The supervisor said the town will press forward with its plans to close the airport on February 28 and reopen it on March 4. He added that any disruption of historical air traffic patterns when the airport reopens would be the FAA’s fault — imploring pilots and aviation industry advocates, who have been fierce critics of the town, to focus their lobbying power on the federal agency.

“The town would like this change of status to be as seamless and as least disruptive to aviation as possible,” the supervisor said, reading a statement at the start of Thursday’s meeting, via Zoom. “The FAA letter does not state that a private use airport will not be available on March 4. We remain confident that it will open on that date and look forward to ushering in a new chapter of aviation in East Hampton that is consistent with the concerns that have been raised by many of us.”

The “airspace analysis” and procedural considerations that the FAA administrator said were necessary, Van Scoyoc claimed, should not be a lengthy process, since the airport had been operating with FAA approvals previously.

But the agency administrator said the FAA would need to examine flight patterns at and around the airport and issue new “special use” procedures for flights approaching the airport. While the conditions may be the same as at the current airport, she said, the FAA still must follow its protocols.

“While the ‘new’ airport will open on the same site, with the same facilities as the airport being deactivated, FAA has not analyzed this airspace in many years,” wrote Kennington-Gardiner, who has worked at the agency for more than 30 years. “Private airports cannot use publicly funded procedures. Special use procedures would have to be developed if the town wants to replace the canceled public use instrument flight procedures … The special use procedures would need to meet certain criteria and, if replicating the public use procedures, may require amendment.”

She said that the airport’s control tower and other equipment would have to be certified anew, and the town would also need to re-establish coordination with New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, known as TRACON, the agency that coordinates flights throughout the New York region to ensure safety at major airports.

At particular issue is whether the airport can operate under “instrument flight rules,” or IFR, which allow aircraft to come and go when visibility is limited using guidance systems that direct their approaches. If the GPS-based guidance is not available, the airport would have to operate under “visual flight rules,” or VFR, which would effectively limit flights to daylight hours and when skies are clear.

Van Scoyoc said the town believes it can open an airport without the instrument flight rules, using only visual flight rules, if the FAA is unable to approve the instrument procedures by March 4.

“The town believes that all of the issues raised by the FAA can be easily addressed by the FAA if it chooses,” Van Scoyoc said. “Any delay by the FAA will be self-inflicted and unnecessary.”

A VFR-only airport would be greatly curtailed, with far fewer flights that could come and go at the airport, both by unpredictable and rapidly changing weather and by general aviation practice. Most jets operate under IFR conditions at all times, and many pilots of all types of aircraft use computer-generated IFR approaches to airports as a matter of convenience and safety, regardless of visibility conditions.

Veterans aviators have said that a VFR-only airport without a control tower would invite chaos in the skies around the airport, as aircraft would “scud run” the airport, the aviation term for swooping in below low clouds, or abandon approaches because of poor visibility and divert to other airports.

Van Scoyoc sought to recruit the lobbying power of those pilots to put pressure on the FAA to restore the airport’s flight services quickly. “The town encourages all stakeholders,” he said, “to work to help complete this process. If you would like the airport open, with a tower [and] instrument procedures … we encourage you to contact the FAA.”

The supervisor said that the Town Board is steadfast in its stated goals to limit aircraft traffic, and that it believes that a private airport and tailored new rules on which aircraft can come and go is the only way to achieve that, short of closing the airport — an option the board has said is clearly not the desire of most town residents and is not under consideration at this point.

In his statement, Van Scoyoc did offer a hint at how the town has been planning to implement its restrictions, saying that it was “likely” some level of commercial operations would be allowed to continue under the prior permission required approach.

Charter flights between New York City and East Hampton Airport, especially by helicopters, have been the main driver behind the push for drastic changes to the airport’s management or its closure, and a ban on all commercial flights has been among the restrictions discussed at town meetings on the options.

The Eastern Regions Helicopter Council, a consortium of helicopter pilots, said that the FAA’s warning confirmed what they had feared would be a crippling change at East Hampton’s facility.

“The FAA letter finally clarifies the true reality of closing the East Hampton Airport and just some of the damaging unintended consequences,” Loren Riegelhaupt, the group’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “Rather than following the flawed advice of paid consultants and going against the wishes of roughly 80 percent of the town and their preference to keep the airport open, we again urge the Town Board to work with the aviation community to keep the airport open and find alternative solutions. Our door remains open and, as always, we are willing and eager to work with the town to finally resolve these issues and avoid the added burden to our roads, infrastructure and taxpayer funds.”

But Van Scoyoc recalled in his statement that the town had appealed to the FAA and airport users for years to work with the town to tamp down the din of aircraft — to no avail.

“Since 2015, the town tried to work with the FAA to establish reasonable limits at the public use East Hampton Airport,” he said. “The FAA did not provide assistance, the airport users did not provide assistance, and the town undertook a robust process to inform the decisions with regard to the airport after the expiration of the grant assurances.”

The letter from the FAA introduced a substantial moment of “I told you so” from other aviation interests, too, who have argued since the town started weighing the possibility of closing the airport “temporarily” that doing so was fraught with complications that could mean far greater impacts on flights than intended, or a long-term closure.

Kathryn Slye, a local pilot and frequent critic of the town’s attempts to limit aircraft traffic, noted that she, quite literally, had told them so with regard to several of the points that Kennington-Gardiner raised in her letter on Wednesday.

“I’ve written letters … telling you that if you want instrument flight rules, there is a minimum of 180 days to apply for that, and that the control tower has to be coordinated with TRACON in advance,” she said, calling in to the virtual town meeting on Thursday. “How many times have I called in and told you, cautioned you, that you didn’t have any of these things in place?”

During a meeting last month, the attorney who has guided the town through its years-long effort to seize more control of flights at the airport, Bill O’Connor of Cooley LLP, advised the town it had five options for its management of the airport now that FAA grant assurances have expired and the town can close the airport if it sees fit: close it, leave it as is, embark on a long and costly process with the FAA to craft mandatory restrictions on flights, or close it temporarily and reopen it as a private airport with new limits on flights.

He said the FAA had recently introduced a fifth possibility: that the airport could be simply reclassified as a private airport, without the temporary closure, and the town could work with FAA on drafting and adopting new controls. But, O’Connor advised, that path would not give the town the same “maximum flexibility” to adjust rules as it sees fit.

Remaining open throughout would leave the FAA with certain authority to veto changes to flight procedures, Van Scoyoc said. Closing the airport, even briefly, would extinguish the FAA’s interest in the facility and give the town free reign.

Following O’Connor’s presentation, the town announced its plans for the three-day closure and reopening and soon after adopted resolutions ordering its attorney to file paperwork with the FAA notifying it of the planned deactivation and applying for activation of a new, private, airport.

“At that meeting, concerns about the feasibility of the reopening plan were batted aside and everyone was given the impression that this was fully vetted and the path was well understood,” Eric Salzman, an airplane owner, said on Thursday of the January discussions. “Several callers, myself included, said why not take the less risky option, option five, and do this in a timely way with FAA cooperation. And that was batted aside.”

Mr. Salzman said the town’s stance on Thursday seemed to be “playing chicken” with FAA and gambling that the agency would bend its rules and expedite the re-certification of all the procedures currently in place at the airport in order to prevent disruptions to air traffic.

“Everyone was left with the impression that you had this in hand and, apparently, now the federal government is telling you that you don’t,” Salzman added. “I really think you should step back and say this didn’t turn out the way you thought it would, it didn’t’ turn out the way you presented to the public that it would. You should take a step back and go to option 5, which is work with the FAA, set new standards and take local control of the airport that way.”

Another resident, a veteran attorney, said that regardless of the town’s interpretation of the FAA’s letter, its simple existence could have far-reaching legal implications for the airport and for town officials themselves.

“If I were advising you as a Town Board … I would guarantee you that if there is a mishap at the airport, you will be sued personally in light of this letter from the FAA,” said Mel Immergut, a Sagapoanck resident who described himself as the former chairman of one of the nation’s largest law firms. “Until you have the approval of the FAA with all the issues they’ve raised here, you’re all running a serious risk of personal liability if there is any sort of crash or other incident at the airport.

“If I were advising the people who want to keep the airport closed,” Immergut continued, “once you close it, if you try to open it four days later, I would advise them to go into court and say it is not safe to open it in light of all the issues that the FAA has raised here.”

Immergut said he did not see the temporary closure approach being “realistic” and advised them to consult personal attorneys about their potential exposure to liability in their official roles.

Slye, who is also an attorney, said she thinks that there is actually an ulterior motive behind the town’s brinksmanship with the FAA.

“You have blatantly misrepresented this to this community, when you knew there was no way this airport could be reopened in three days,” she said. “Your goal is to close this airport permanently.”