CopperState Fly In

I want to congratulate the organizers and hosts of the CopperState Fly In at Casa Grande. The weather was perfect. Attendance was good. And the pilots all managed to safely find the ground and depart without the aid of FAA Air Traffic Controllers. As an annual attendee, it appeared to me that the FAA missing had no impact of the flying done by both the vendors and the attendees. If anything, it was improved. Good job planning, executing, and for the pilots showing that they still know how to fly without the FAA.

-CubBuilder

Thanks!

You may have noticed that we had the old tower set up and staffed by one or two people, watching the pattern and monitoring CTAF. That paid off on Saturday-- an LSA lost power after takeoff on runway 5, and made a 180 (yeah, I know, let's not get into that....) to land on 23. The volunteers staffing 122.7 were briefed not to get involved with traffic management unless there was a safety of flight issue, but decided this was one. They advised the twin Cessna landing on 5 to go-around, in time to avoid what could have been a very ugly meeting with the LSA landing the other way.

Beyond that, there were no issues. The only other time we got involved was to facilitate a runway change on Saturday afternoon, which was pretty straightforward. I don't think you'll see an FAA tower at Copperstate again, even if they offer to do it for free.

Denny
Copperstate Air Ops

Thanks Denny for your input. Good to know it was well attended and a safe weekend. I know many were watching this fly-in as a test case for the challenges of no tower ops.
This begs the questions:
Stats...
What was the fly in "gate"?
How many "operations" per day?
What were the more challenging times for ops and why?
What was the most challenging part?
What went smoother than expected.
What kind of feedback did you get from the pilots flying in and those who did not because of no tower.
Will there be an advisory for next year - like the one for this?
Jim Heffelfinger
Sacramento
coming next year

I did notice the volunteer staffing of the portable tower cab and was near the flight line during the incident you described, although I didn't notice it. Your volunteers did a bang up job. I was wondering if they were assisting in turning around the runway as that was really the only time we saw the potential for traffic confusion.

As a pilot that flew in and talked to many other pilots on the flight line, you got a resounding thumbs up for leaving the FAA out. Having flown into every Copperstate Fly In at Casa Grande, (and many others before it moved back to Casa Grande) I thought it was easier without the tower, although admittedly it was not busy when I arrived mid day on Thursday. Many that had been there before were still calling out the rest area approach, while others went straight to the pattern, although I didn't see a lot of confusion over it. Previously, there was always the issue of losing communications during the handoff from approach to tower. With CTAF unicom, pilots kept the chatter to a minimum and it worked well with everyone on the same frequency.

-CubBuilder

Heresy!!!
You guys are telling us the an FAA control tower is not vital to safe and fun flight in good VMC weather? How can that be? Doesn't everyone know that the only thing holding an airplane up is the rising hot air put out by the endless verbage of some controllers? And some of those planes were not even jet powered, didn't have a "glass cockpit" or maybe even a radio.
I hope the authorities crack down on this kind of rebellious thinking before it spreads.

Congrats on moving on without the FAA. Now, if we could get them out of another 200 or so airfields across the US, we'd go a long ways toward streamlining ops nationwide.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jim Heffelfinger

Thanks Denny for your input. Good to know it was well attended and a safe weekend. I know many were watching this fly-in as a test case for the challenges of no tower ops.
This begs the questions:
Stats...

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What was the fly in "gate"? No clue at this point-- there'll be a debrief meeting in mid- to late-November, probably get some numbers then. It's usually around 5000 paid admissions..

How many "operations" per day? Again, no clue-- nobody keeps track. Pretty sure that Thursday had more airplanes than we've ever seen on a Thursday before; Friday and Saturday seemed about average. My guess is about 400 airplanes, but it's just a guess.

What were the more challenging times for ops and why? Probably Friday and Saturday, 9am to around 11am; lots of arrivals, few departures, but there were still some (expletive deleted) types shooting practice ILS approaches at the same time.

What was the most challenging part? Actually, the Saturday runway change, because there were a lot of airplanes ready for departure at runway 5, when the arrivals elected to start landing on runway 23. The wind wasn't much, so the runway 5 departures still wanted to use that runway, rather than turn around and be at the end of the departure line for 23. All we did was hold the runway 23 departures until the runway 5 guys were gone, but it got a little dicey, because the arrivals were already landing on 23. We tried to stay out of operational decisions (for liability reasons), but I'd like to reevaluate that for next year when it comes to runway-in-use, see if there's a way we can be a little more proactive.

What went smoother than expected. Arrivals sorting themselves out. We were all amazed at how well everyone worked together, no pattern nazi's, just solid coordination and cooperation. Things got busy, but never bad enough to scare us or tempt us to get involved.

What kind of feedback did you get from the pilots flying in and those who did not because of no tower. About 90% positive response, some people said they were there for the first time because they never wanted to screw around with special procedures and a tower. OTOH, I heard from half a dozen pilots that said they elected to drive in, rather than fly, because they thought it would be a zoo without a tower. Hopefully, they'll feel differently next year.

Will there be an advisory for next year - like the one for this? Things went well, I don't see reason to change much. Probably just change the dates on the Notice to Pilots and publish it on the website pretty much as-is.


For anyone else involved in organizing this type of event, one thing I did that I think helped a lot (compared to other events I've attended) was to establish a separate "Flight Line Ops" frequency for traffic on the ground-- so there was zero discussion of parking, fuel, etc., on CTAF. We put signs at all the runway exits with the freq, and the flagmen had the freq written on their back, so they could just turn around and point at it if needed. I think this eliminated a lot of extraneous exchanges on CTAF, freeing up airtime for more important stuff.

Just to be clear, while this went well, the results of eliminating the tower weren't ALL positive: we had to eliminate the Showcase flights (although a few exhibitors did fly short demos in the pattern when traffic was slow), and we had a lot fewer flybys-- particularly from the jets and other high performance types. Not that I blame them-- it's one thing to zing down the runway at 250 knots in an L39 or P51 when you're confident that the tower has gotten other aircraft out of the way, and quite another when there's nobody there to do that.

Denny