| By Tim Seeman, Big Radio News Staff |
As the Federal Aviation Administration is swept into the Trump administration’s efforts to scale down the federal government, the director of the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport has her eyes on the horizon.
Director Aimee Scrima says county and state aviation officials are taking a wait-and-see approach amid the daily churn of headlines coming out of Washington.
“Even if they do make drastic cuts, there has to be some sort of answer to, ‘OK, so you cut that — who looks at our master plan now?'” Scrima said.
“Maybe more is on the state at this point, but the state hasn’t received direction, so we’re kind of just in a holding pattern — not to use an aviation term, but I am going to use an aviation term — we’re in a holding pattern until we get further direction.”
The federal government’s footprint at the Janesville airport is significant.
“On site, we have a couple of our navigational equipments that’s managed and maintained by the FAA, so we have tech ops out here,” Scrima said. “They’re here at least weekly, if not more, just PM’ing them (doing preventive maintenance) or tuning them up or recalibrating or whatever else.”
Scrima says the technicians they regularly work with have continued reporting for duty even as the administration has tried to push out federal employees. Many of those efforts face legal challenges.
The air traffic control tower at the local airport is federally owned, but the controllers are not FAA employees.
“Midwest Air Traffic Control is our contractor,” Scrima said. “The contractor hasn’t experienced, to my knowledge, any concerns or turnover or anything. They operate like an FAA tower; they’re just not FAA employees.”
Scrima says the feds cover 90 to 95% of costs for capital projects at the airport.
The director told the airport board last week that a couple of facilities projects are currently on hold as they wait for federal authorization to proceed. She characterized those delays as typical with the various layers of government involved in the work.
Air travel remains safe
Scrima says people have been asking her lately if it’s still safe to travel by air after last month’s midair collision of a passenger jet and military helicopter over Washington, D.C.
Her answer: an emphatic yes.
“I wouldn’t have any anxiety over traveling commercially or otherwise now,” she said. “The main issue is that those accidents have lately been hitting more than one news cycle and so you see it more often and get updates more often.”
Other incidents that garnered national media attention recently were a passenger plane that flipped on the tarmac in Toronto and another midair collision between small planes in Marana, Arizona.
Despite the attention, the National Transportation Safety Board’s monthly aviation dashboard showed just 63 accidents in January, the lowest monthly number in records dating to 1982.
February is trending to beat that mark with just 37 accident reports logged as of Sunday morning.
