East Hampton’s move to close its public airport, East Hampton Airport (KHTO), at the end of this month and reopen it as a private-use facility in March has been delayed until May 17. This extra time will allow the town and FAA to attempt working together to resolve approval issues with its airspace, tower staffing, procedures, and IFR approaches. Under the revised schedule, the airport is expected to reopen May 19.
On Thursday, town supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc acknowledged that recertifying instrument approaches into the airport could take until the end of the summer and would make the field essentially VFR-only until then. The FAA had previously warned the town that converting to private use would require a variety of approvals that could take up to two years and would disable all FAA-operated navigational, weather, and communications aids and that Class D airspace will not be applicable. The FAA noted that “private airports cannot use publicly-funded procedures,” that replacement procedures developed must be “special-use” and must be approved by the FAA, and that “navigational, weather, and communications aids must be reestablished.”
The town’s strategy to convert the airport to private-use, officially in the name of noise abatement, has prompted charges that the town was at least partially motivated by the presence of $10 million of unspent federal grant funds designated for the airport, which, by converting the airport to private use, the town could try and use for other purposes. In February the town announced that it would spend exactly $10 million to acquire 12.4 acres of prime real estate, convert it to farmland, and lease it to a farmer.
Converting the airport also has drawn widespread criticism from a variety of aviation interests. Earlier this month, Kenneth Grimes, the vice president of air ambulance conglomerate Global Medical Response, warned the town board that the move would eliminate the airport’s “essential utility it provides the community” by making it, essentially, a VFR-only airport, thereby “limiting access in weather conditions that frequently prevail on the eastern end of Long Island, crippling our capacity to serve the area, and impeding our ability to save lives.”
Jeff Smith, v-p of operations and government affairs for the Eastern Region Helicopter Council, warned fellow members, “We are in a very serious time here. We are continuing to work through this issue and want to remind everyone that [KHTO] is everybody’s problem. Covid has put incredible strain on our heliport infrastructure and they are having hard financial times. The summer service is very important to them so a reduction or change in operations will greatly affect their livelihood.” In an article published earlier this month in the Long Island Business News, Smith maintained that hastily converting the airport to private use would simply move the local noise problem to other area communities and create “chaos in the skies and more traffic on our roads.”
Smith’s concerns were echoed by Rob Wiesenthal, CEO of Blade Air Mobility. Wiesenthal told AIN that the airport is “one of the most important pieces of infrastructure” on eastern Long Island and that converting it to private use “is not the right method” to achieve the town’s advertised goal of noise abatement. “We’ve flown tens of thousands of people back and forth between various bases in the Hamptons [and New York City] and they are not going to stop flying. There are lots of alternative landing zones from South Hampton to Montauk to Sag Harbor that can be used by amphibious seaplanes, helicopters you name it. Sag Harbor is only a ten-minute drive to the East Hampton airport. What incentive will operators have to fly noise abatement routes if all of a sudden the [East Hampton] airport is either closed or has numerous restrictions to constrain the number of flights?”
Wiesenthal said that Blade had proposed a number of noise abatement solutions to the town board including the use of over-water routes, deeper curfews, leaving aircraft at the airport on Sunday night for Monday morning commutes, and limiting the use of noisier and larger aircraft during early mornings and late evenings. “There’s a lot we can do with curfews, altitudes, and routes,” Wiesenthal said. “But the town needs to engage.”