Exaggeration takes off over the airport

Looks like Chicken Little has taken wing over the airport.

Having just landed here from a place with a busy airport and a high quality of life - arguably higher than here - I know that both are not only possible, but can work hand in hand.

The Minden-Tahoe Airport will never approach the traffic of Vail's airport, second-busiest in Colorado during winter. Not with three other airports right next door, as the bald eagle flies. Phony weight limits, new banks of private plane hangers, and the most ambitious master plans will not change that.

Throw "Tahoe" around the airport's name all you want, that won't change the fact. Douglas County's airport will remain humble even without the hysteria that rises over every new thought about the place.

Actually, a bit more business through the airport would help the local economy and in turn our quality of life here. The local economy can use the little boost from an airport used more to its potential than it is now.

Not to worry, glider pilots. Airbuses are hardly inbound. There's no gridlock of Gulfstreams in the sky waiting for approach. The outside world is about as likely to find Minden as the island shielding the survivors in "Lost."

There's no John Wayne, Ontario, JFK, Heathrow, Denver or suburban Denver in the cards for Carson Valley.

Let's get real.

The weight limit is silly, as the FAA has pointed out. And if only rich Silicon Valley sharpies would park their private planes here en masse. Ranchos or Johnson Lane residents are not going to lose sleep if a few more planes take off and land. Civilization as we know it is not imperiled, however wildly the protesters holler louder than the jets they decry.

Not that they are going to stop hollering. That's their right, if they feel so disposed, and they must believe what they are saying. But ask most of the supposedly aggrieved Carson Valley about the airport, they're as likely as not to ask where it is.

Pardon me if I scoff a bit. The Eagle County Regional Airport, known as Vail-Eagle to skiers the world over, really does have a steady stream of plump airliners this time of year. I can see them approach from my house out there. They come in night and day, waved in by a tower, finding the runway by radar if they must. It's just not a big deal.

They also have one of the busiest private jet craft businesses of anywhere. Dick Cheney must bring half the Air Force with him each summer, and President Ford before him came regularly in Air Force 1 once upon a time.

None of this has been a big deal in a valley much tighter, more densely populated and sensitive to noise than this one.

So yeah, I'm not buying all these imagined horrors of lifting a fictional weight limit and fearing a future that actually could help the Carson Valley.

There's not really much to fear in the airport growing to its natural potential, which will not push aside glider enthusiasts, start a stampede of new residents, or drive neighbors batty with unrelenting noise.

The bigger noise has come from all that squawking about a future that's not about to happen, even if everything the protesters threw out there came true.

Let's put it this way. That ain't the sky falling with these birds.

n Don Rogers, publisher of The Record-Courier, can be reached at 782-5121, ext. 208, or drogers@recordcourier.com.