by OTTOL » Thu Oct 09, 2003 9:25 pm
Glad to hear it. It seems like these days, all sorts of doors are being closed to the general public. I went to Hollywood North Perry airport the other day, and had a bad experience.
Starting when I was in High School, and until as recently as last year, I used to visit HWO on occasion. You could drive right up to the 50 or so hangars on the North side, and check out the airplanes, and talk to the owners. If you wanted to, you could bring a lunch and sit out on one of several picnic tables between the hangars and the runway, and watch the banner planes dive down and pickup banners. If you've never seen this, it's incredible to watch. They use Super-Cubs, that are stripped of all but the essentials. They loaf in at about 70kts, and 75-100' and then dive at about a 45-50 degree angle. About 15' from the ground, they pull the airplane straight back up at what seems like a 60degree angle. This wips the cable down, so that it grabs the banner lanyard, and then the whole banner unravels, as the Cub blats away at probably 60 or 70kts, slowly climbing. I got my first ride in an RV4 while hanging out a the T-hangars there, one day. And the first time I got to go to a control tower was at Perry. I always said that I wanted MY children to experience these kinds of things. The other day I took my two year old daughter down to look at airplanes at the T-hangars. Federal Prisons have more friendly entrances than what awaits you now at North Perry. Every gate that was once open, is now covered by an electric, coded one. TSA signs litter the place. I'm sure the economy is a factor, but all of the security doesn't come for free. And the place doesn't exactly have a warm friendly air about it anymore, to say the least. I saw a lot of derelict, rotting airplanes as a result. I could only stand a couple of minutes of this, and even for my two year old, looking at defunct airplanes, several hundred yards away, through a chainlink fence, didn't hold much appeal. I would like to go on about how it makes me sick to my stomach, to think that, in a round about way, I'm paying for this. That is, through extra funding to support the "knee-jerk squad" known as the TSA, but I guess it really doesn't have a place here. The main point that I wanted to make is, I take pleasure in introducing people to my side of "the fence" at my home airport. So when someone asks about something of this nature, I try to help out whenever possible.
.....so I loaded up the plane and moved to Middle-EEEE..........OIL..that is......
