Tonight Santa Monica City Council staffers will recommend that the council adopt a resolution to close the airport to aviation uses as part of an effort to shutter the airport by July 1, 2018. The resolution is expected to be adopted, but first those of us who are attending the council meeting are going to have to listen to an endless barrage of anti- and pro-airport opinionators voicing the same old reasons why the airport should be closed or remain open.
The resolution contains some interesting claims by the city, but it doesn’t address the big elephant in the room: the city’s instrument of transfer agreement after World War II to keep the airport open in perpetuity. That is subject to yet another legal battle, which is expected to go to trial next year. I’m assuming that’s why the city claims that it can close the airport in 2018.
Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.
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