Vote against repeal and for the future of City Airport
Living in Kalispell, as I have for 34 years, is a choice with an obvious cost for doing business: Getting your “crew” to Billings, Spokane, Calgary, Seattle, etc. on short notice is expensive.
Both long hours on the road and crowded airlines chew up resources, while the latter herds us through a post-terrorist humiliation no one would have tolerated, back when we all believed in a more personal future of flight.
Yes, the 9,000 small airfields across this country bear crumbling witness to the once-reasonable dream of a free society: Some day we could fly, in comfort and safety, wherever, whenever.
Yet instead of relentlessly engineering our way toward that Jetsonian utopia, flying grew ever less practical and ever more expensive. Soon the neighbors even started blaming their antecedent local airports for what the noisy 50-year-old airplanes do.
Our great-grandparents figured we would all be quietly zipping along by now, in sleek modern spaceships of the highest technology. Every local airfield would be a shining hub of regional tourism and commerce, not a prime parcel of real estate for the developers to wrangle over on public (and hidden) agendas.
Today we can package the technologies to navigate, fly, and emergency-land family-sized airplanes onto any smartphone. Yet there are no quiet, roomy, affordable fuel-efficient airplanes in which to put such enabling advancements. (We don’t need gas-guzzling bizjets, we need smart, economical, direct regional transportation solutions for ordinary people.)
Well, Kalispell, that is what my company, Synergy Aircraft, is here to provide, and we hope to be doing it with full community support right here on Kalispell City Airport in the years to come. Our job-creating plan responds to overwhelming global demand for an airplane so advanced that Popular Science named it the Best Invention of 2013. With aircraft like Synergy on the horizon, the nine-hour nightmare trip to Boise becomes an hour’s scenic tour, at a cost far less than either driving or commercial tickets.
Our city airport is a gem — a real jewel that only a minority have seen in full context. When locals get to fly in and out as they like, from fabulous small towns like ours (as pilots do now at greater expense), they learn how precious their community airport is in keeping that character intact.
A vital airport, if served by efficient, safe, comfortable modern aircraft, becomes the very best on-demand portal to the larger world we need but hope to keep at bay.
John W. McGinnis, of Kalispell, is manager of Synergy Aircraft.