Still maintaining secrecy about its founders, the ad-hoc Friedman Airport Users Alliance has renewed its attack on proposals to relocate Friedman Memorial Airport and ultimately close the Hailey airfield.
A colorful new flyer printed on two sides of a standard sheet of glossy paper was distributed this week in the valley and in some cases tacked on bulletin boards.
The flyer is a sharply condensed version of a 34-page prospectus and membership application posted on the Internet earlier this year. In that version, the FAUA identified itself as an Idaho entity. However, the Idaho secretary of state's corporate registry lists no such group.
Friedman Memorial Airport Authority member Len Harlig quickly rejected assertions in the new flyer that Friedman doesn't need to be relocated. The governing panel's chairwoman, Martha Burke, and vice chairman, Tom Bowman, were not immediately available for comment.
"I was unable to find a single paragraph that isn't either a misrepresentation or hadn't been previously rejected as false by the Federal Aviation Administration," Harlig said. "I would advise anyone looking at this FAUA funding scheme to contact the FAA directly before investing either time or money in this funding solicitation."
Friedman Manager Rick Baird said as much, calling the flyer "the same old misrepresentation and inaccuracies." He said "the underlying tone of the comments [in the flyer] is that [the FAUA] doesn't care about air service, just the convenience of high-end [aircraft] users of the airport."
For example, Baird cited one claim that 80 percent of the winter airline flight diversions and cancellations at Friedman could have been prevented with an RNP/WAAS (Required Navigation Performance/Wide Area Augmentation System) weather landing system.
Baird noted that the FAA's Western Flight Procedures Office in Seattle recently ruled that "neither WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) nor LAAS (Local Area Augmentation System) will change the terrain features surrounding SUN [Friedman's FAA-designated code] that currently drive the existing [weather] minimums."
In the decision, the FAA said mountainous terrain on three sides of Friedman require pilots of multi-engine aircraft making a missed-approach on instruments to execute a go-around on a single engine.
At various points on approaches, pilots observe altitude rules, such as "decision height," "minimum decent altitude" and "missed approach point."
FAUA, which lists its mailing address as Box 3830 in Hailey and a telephone with a Lewiston, Idaho, 717 prefix, is offering a corporate membership at $1,000, a senior membership at $250 and associate membership at $100. An Alaska aviation consultant, Paul Bowers, has identified himself as FAUA's spokesman, but declines to say who is paying him.
