Local FAA official left out of loop

LEXINGTON, Kentucky USA — The Federal Aviation Administration allowed model rockets to be launched Saturday into the airspace of planes departing from Lexington's Blue Grass Airport without consulting a local FAA official who had objected over safety concerns.

MORE ON THE STORY:
• NASA aviation safety incident report
• FAA letter over rocket launches

Air-traffic controllers said they were alarmed by the launches and initially diverted some flights.

They said the FAA should not have issued a waiver allowing the Bluegrass Rocketry Society to conduct the launches, some of which involved rockets 5 feet long.

"You can see it's unsafe," said Randy Harris, president of the Lexington local of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the Louisville FAA official who approved the waiver, Robert E. Kelly Jr., should have checked with the Lexington air-traffic manager before doing so.

"That didn't happen in this case," she said.

Asked why the FAA would allow rocket launches near an airport, Brown said: "We try to allow a variety of different uses of the airspace."

She said that she knew of no aircraft that were endangered.

Harris said the kind of damage a rocket could inflict on a plane would depend on the aircraft's size and where it was hit. He said his first concern would be ingestion of a rocket into a jet engine, which would destroy the engine and force an emergency landing.

A rocket also could go through a plane's windshield, injuring the pilot, or hit a spot critical to controlling the aircraft, he said.

Duff Ortman, the FAA's air-traffic manager in Lexington, said in an e-mail that he had opposed the rocket launches for the past two years because of the danger they posed.

Asked about controllers' assertions that he directed them to conduct normal departures through the launch area, Ortman said: "There was no guidance issued by me precluding the controllers from issuing any headings (directions) that they deemed necessary."

Harris said the controllers initially directed planes away from the area, but Ortman told them to "put the planes back on track" on the normal departure route over the launch area.

Brown declined to make Ortman and Kelly available for interviews. But she said regardless of the waiver, because Ortman believes the rocket launches present a collision hazard, they will no longer be allowed. She said she did not know whether the waiver would be rescinded.

The president of the rocket club, Darryl Hankes of Greensburg, said no aircraft were ever in danger.

"There was never an issue with planes," he said. "It's kind of hard to miss a big old plane coming, isn't it? You hear 'em, you see 'em, you're not going to try and shoot 'em. We're just out there trying to have fun, enjoying our hobby."

Chuck Ellis, director of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government's Parks and Recreation Division, said the rocket club did not have permission to use Masterson Station Park. Hankes said he was told only yesterday that the club needed permission to be in the park.

Some of the rockets launched Saturday were as much as 4 to 5 feet tall, but none went over 3,500 feet in altitude, Hankes said.

The controllers said that departing jets going through the area wouldn't have been much above 3,000 feet and that piston-powered planes would have been lower.

Harris estimated that the airport handled about 40 commercial and private flights from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, using Runway 4 for departures. About 20 of those flights went through the launch area after mid-afternoon, he said, when Ortman told controllers to put planes on the normal departure course.

Ortman told a tower controller that he couldn't do anything about the rocket launches unless he had formal complaints, Harris said.

The rocket-launch area was about four miles northeast of the end of Runway 4.

Controllers filed two reports with NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System, the agency responsible for collecting information on aviation incidents, regarding the Lexington situation. Both reports, provided to The Courier-Journal, were filed anonymously.

Pilots were warned of the rocket activity through a Notice to Airmen, the controllers wrote. According to one of the reports filed with NASA, a man with the rocket group told the controllers "that it was a `one in a million chance' that a rocket would hit a plane and that `only one plane snuck up on them this morning.'"

Hankes said that the chances of hitting a plane with a rocket were greater than one-in-a-million and that no planes snuck up on the rocketeers Saturday.

The controller who filed the other NASA report wrote: "It is my opinion that this waiver should never have been issued and that safety at Lex airport on May 12, 2007, for all departures was compromised."

According to the FAA waiver given to the rocket club and provided to The Courier-Journal by Mark Thompson, the club's treasurer, approval for the launches was granted Nov. 3.

The waiver, valid from Nov. 1, 2006, to Oct. 31 of this year, allowed multiple rocket launches up to an altitude of 9,000 feet mean sea level, or 8,000 feet above the surface.

The waiver came with 11 special provisions governing launches. One of the provisions was that "observers shall make a scan of the launch area for a radius of three statute miles for the presence of aircraft prior to the launch countdown."

Another provision stated that Thompson had to notify the Lexington airport tower "30 minutes prior to any rocket launch."

Harris said that, by early afternoon Saturday, the controllers had not heard from the club and that there was no phone number to reach club members directly. So the tower called the airport, and the airport called local police to ask them to go to the park and find Thompson, who was designated on the waiver as the person responsible for the launches.

Harris and Thompson both said there were then discussions over the phone between Thompson and the tower over the launch operations, and the controllers voiced their concerns about the danger to aircraft.

Thompson said the club followed all of its safety rules. As for notifying the tower 30 minutes before a launch, he said he interpreted that to mean 30 minutes before all the launch operations began, not before every launch.

Otherwise, he said, "what's the use to have the waiver?"

He estimated that the 10 club members present Saturday conducted 80 to 90 launches.

"It's our airspace also, as a taxpayer and everything," Thompson said.

The FAA's Brown said Thompson's interpretation was wrong.

"He doesn't determine the point of the waiver, we do," she said. "He didn't meet the requirements of the waiver."

Hankes said a rocket launch, from liftoff to return to earth by parachute, usually takes no more than a minute.

He said the club has used the park every other month since last year without problems.

Copyright  2007, The Courier-Journal.