Tue, Aug 05, 2003
"Daley Shows His Ignorance, Indifference To Air Safety"
The Friends of Meigs, an aviation
consumer group dedicated -- even at this late date -- to reopening
the airport Chicago's mayor bulldozed under cover of darkness, says
Mayor Richard Daley got it all wrong again. The group says Daley
displayed "amazing ignorance and indifference to the safety of a
pilot" who made an emergency landing at the closed Meigs Field on
Sunday.
Daley was quoted in a news conference as saying "This is the
city of Chicago. It's in the state of Illinois. Oshkosh is up
there. It's north of here a couple hours. If he's going to Oshkosh,
that man is going in the wrong direction." According to the Chicago
Sun-Times, his insinuation was that the incident might have been
intentional to embarrass the mayor for his recent closure of
Meigs.
Friends of Meigs says
the Mayor's comments reflect both a callous indifference to the
safety of air traffic in the region and a woeful ignorance of the
airspace around Chicago and its traffic.
In fact, because pilots usually do not fly single-engine
aircraft over Lake Michigan as a precaution in case of mechanical
difficulty, a great deal of traffic between the EAA convention and
points east passes along the busy VFR lakefront flyway over
Chicago's lake shore.
The wisdom of this practice was only proven by the experience of
the pilot landing at Meigs on Sunday. Suffering from an
alternator failure and a loss of radio communications, and faced
with increasing rain and falling visibilities, the pilot did the
safe thing: Landed at Meigs.
The Friends of Meigs Field responded with a press release today,
detailing how the pilot was exactly where he should have been if he
had really been en route from Michigan (originally from Maine) to
Oshkosh (WI).
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