RCU Forums - View Single Post - Club letter to local airports within five miles
Old 09-15-2014, 05:19 PM
  #252  
Top_Gunn
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Granger, IN
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No I said "That 5-mile radius is also only good up to 2,500 feet AGL. So yes a 1:1 plane can fly closer than 5 miles from an airport so long as it’s 2.501 feet above the airport." In the context of your own statement; "For example, full-scale planes routinely fly closer than five (or three) miles from small private airports (and even some larger ones) without notifying anyone, let alone getting permission." It was a specific answer to your specific what if... And the cite is found here
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For Heaven's sake! That rule applies only in Class D airspace. The great majority of airports in the US are in Class E or Class G airspace. And very, very few "small private airports" like the ones I'm worried about are in Class D airspace.

As for never seeing anyone from the FAA, someone from the FAA visited my club's field a couple of months ago after we put in a runway. I think he was there to check that we had painted an "X" at each end, to keep full-scale planes from trying to land there. (We had.)

As for enforcement, though, I agree that the FAA isn't going to go around checking on whether we've gotten permission to fly from some guy with a backyard airstrip. But that doesn't mean we're safe. What could happen, for instance, is somebody has an accident causing enough personal injury or property damage to get people's attention. And then it turns out we're flying near an airport and didn't get permission, and the government prosecutes. Or a neighbor who doesn't like modeling complains, repeatedly, so they look into it and find that we've violated a law. And so on.

Your constant references to my character prompt another observation. Your posts here are a prime example of what C.S. Lewis called "Bulverism." It amounts to talking about the reasons why someone has said something wrong without taking the preliminary step of showing that he is in fact wrong. His example was a guy telling his wife that the sum of the lengths of two sides of a triangle has to exceed the length of the third side, and she responds by saying,, "You're just saying that because you're a man." It's really not a sensible way to conduct an argument.

Last edited by Top_Gunn; 09-15-2014 at 05:30 PM.