An explosion in flight training traffic at Mesa, Arizona’s Falcon Field is widely speculated to be behind proposed landing fees at the airport. The city council will vote Feb. 9 on whether to go ahead with the fees, which would give based aircraft five free landings a month. Aircraft weighing less than 6,000 pounds “maximum landing weight” would pay $29.95 per landing after that. Aircraft weighing more would pay $5.50 per 1,000 pounds. Smaller itinerant aircraft would be charged $33.95 to land and those above 6,000 pounds would pay $6.50 per 1,000 pounds. The city said it will raise more than $3 million a year with the fees, money supporters of the fees say will be needed to cover future revenue shortfalls at the airport.
But few involved in the controversy believe the fees are anything but a way to drive 15 flight schools from the airport. As the school numbers have increased in recent years, so has traffic. Operations went up more than 20% from 354,000 to 430,000 in 2024 and neighbors howled in protest about the resulting noise increase. A petition to cut the noise has gathered more than 1,600 signatures.
Based aircraft owners say they weren’t consulted on the development of the fee proposal, which they say started last February. “The council had a nine-month head start in creating this mess,” a pilot told AvBrief in an email. “The pilot/tenants have had two months to craft a response.” At a recent meeting of the airport administration committee, attendees were told the airport is losing money and the city is not interested in subsidizing it. It was also noted that for some reason a 160-acre orange grove neighboring the airport falls under its budget and loses about $160,000 a year. There is also fear the passage of fees for Falcon Field will embolden councils of neighboring cities to impose similar charges at their airports.
Camel’s nose under the tent …
It seems a bit unclear what the airport authority’s aim is here. If they want to just shut the airport down, this is a convoluted way of doing it.
Landing fee issue aside, being a pilot flying out of an airport in a very densely populated area.. I try to be conscience of the surrounding area and do my best to following the (voluntary) noise abatement rules. The big one for piston aircraft at my airport is “No closed traffic between 10pm and 8:30am local time”. The other items are headings to fly upon departure until reaching specific altitudes.
The problem is we have 3 different “pilot mills” that are simply pushing students through to get their ratings and out, these flight schools simply ignore the noise abatement rules and fly whatever schedules they want. For example, they were out last night at 11pm doing touch and goes and another had two planes out at 6am doing touch and goes. The airport manager has told me he’s had the flight schools flying at 3am to get hours in. How is this respectful of the community, where is the desire to even attempt to maintain a positive relationship with the local community?
Do I think the proposed landing fee in this article is a little draconian? yes. This landing fee structure is obviously designed specifically to chase the flight schools out and whatever clubs might be there as well. The small GA airplane with a single owner will probably not do 5 landings per month at home base.
I know some of you are going to take the attitude that the airport was there first, however the airport was never this large or busy when people moved here 20, 30, 40, or even 50years ago, and these “pilot mill” type schools didn’t exist. The problem I think is shifting (and rightfully so) to the behavior of these flight schools and their arrogance to simply fly at all hours to get their students through their course is causing havoc for the rest of the GA community as airports all over are starting to collect landing fees to discourage flight training ops. There are some airports around here that have NOTAMs published that say no transient T&G landings.
430,000 activity is a bunch. That’s getting up towards some of the airports of the ’70s that were loaded with VA flight training schools. I was a controller at Long Beach at the time. If I’m remembering correctly, we had an annual count of around 460K, and we were the 4th busiest in the country at the time. And it was 90% flight training.
There are 18 Flight Schools plus freelancers at Falcon. One foreign owned flight school makes up about 40% of the operations. I’ve sat in the runup area for 30 minutes plus another 10 just waiting for a taxi clearance. Punishing the local aircraft owners with confiscatory landing fees and jaw dropping increases in hangar and fuel flowage fees is not the solution. People will sell their airplanes but large flight schools will see it as the cost of doing business.
As I’ve seen written “Flight Schools pass on fees, Owners pass on keys” .
There is a price ceiling, and the market sets it. A school can raise rates to cover new fees only up to the point where students stop starting, slow down, or quit. Past that ceiling, the “pass it on” idea breaks, because the demand drops and the school starts bleeding cash. BTW: I flew out of TOA in the late 1960s when there were around 380K ops annually. At times there were 14 aircraft in the pattern. Good training.
I’m sure I was one of them floating around the TOA patch then. TOA was ranked 11th in the country during that time. The L.A basin was a busy place which included SNA and VNY and many more slightly smaller airports. And half of our flying was in “visibility three miles, haze and smoke” as in brown dirty smog. And we lived to tell about it…somehow.
Mom
And Pop flight schools ( which aren’t really in business at Falcon) would face a drop off. For the largest flight school that serves airlines exclusively, they could care less. It’s a cost + business for them. Driving everyone off the field would leave the main noise contributor as the last school standing.
Airports don’t operate in isolation—they compete. Falcon Field competes with other regional airports for fuel sales, hangar tenants, events, and based aircraft. Landing fees instantly put it at a disadvantage, signaling to users that they’re no longer welcome unless they pay extra for the privilege.
That perception matters. Once an airport earns a reputation as “expensive” or “hostile to general aviation,” pilots remember—and they vote with their wings.
In the Phoenix area, that’s not really the case. Hangar wait lists stretch 17+ years and smaller airports are rendered practically unusable due to spillover traffic from flight schools in the area. Check Casa Grande airport ( KCGZ) on Flightaware and see for yourself.
Large flight schools are essentially arms of the Major Airline patrons who have plenty of money to build their own private training fields.
The city is merely going after the softest targets while rolling out the red carpet for corporate bizjet operators who will not do anything to improve the noise complaints.