Dan's Papers - July 25, 2008

I was reading the other day about the plans for improving the East Hampton Airport. They're not much. There's a runway they want to take the potholes out of. There's a former runway they want to make into a second runway. Then there's the airport tower they want to build, that would operate only six months a year.

This puzzled me. Almost every airport I've been to has a tower sticking up where, presumably, they look out at the airplanes from. There's no such tower at East Hampton. But one only six months a year?

I called the airport and talked to the people there for a while. The "tower" these days is just a word, like "dialing" a telephone is just a word. Both used to be real, but now they are not.

In the case of "tower," it refers to a trailer, a temporary thing filled with computers and video screens that you park down at the end of a runway somewhere and pack with traffic controllers. There's no metal tower that goes up high or anything. It's just the trailer.

When you have a "tower," airplanes are required to call it when they get within five miles of the airport.

"Hello, this is XJ42 Delta calling the tower, come in."

Apparently, they only need a "tower" six months a year. The other six months the airport arrivals and departures occur on an every-man-for-himself basis. Pilots can call the airport office, where they have a two-way radio, to ask for the weather report, or for the wind direction, or for what's going on on what runways, but there's no requirement that they do so.

Indeed, right now, the airport operates on an every-man-for-himself basis 12 months a year. That will change slightly if they get the temporary "tower" for the six months of the summer. So there you are.

The East Hampton Airport once DID have a tower. Until 1997, when the new airport terminal was built (without a tower), it was quite the place. It consisted of a World War I Army barracks that a vet had bought for $1 from the Yaphank Army Training Base in Brookhaven in 1919, after the base closed. And when that got in need of being added on to, they got a farmer to tow over an old unused chicken coop, which they attached to the barracks building. Those were the days of the German Fokkers and the bi-planes and a little later, dirigibles and, a little bit later after that, Charles Lindbergh and his flight to Paris from the dirt runway at Roosevelt Field in Nassau County.

Sometime around 1946, right after World War II, the powers that be in East Hampton saw that it was the thing to do to have a "tower" at an airport, and so one January, they called in carpenters to build one. It was attached to the barracks and went up 25 feet. There was a flight of stairs going up. And up on that top floor you could see in every direction because the carpenters had put in these four big picture windows. But this tower was never used. The carpenters never built windows that could open up there. In the summer it was stuffy and hot, and in the winter you froze. Oh well.

Anyway, that's what it looked like in 1989 when Donald Trump created Trump Airlines, which could, on a regular schedule, shuttle the rich to and from the Hamptons in sleek black choppers with his name on the side.

The rich would leave from Manhattan and come out to this dump of an airport terminal. The service lasted two years until it became apparent it was not a money-maker. The next year, the town, probably because they were so embarrassed, decided to knock it all down to build a shiny new airport terminal, which is what we have there now.

So the bottom line here is that there really is no "tower." Nobody looks out and notices Bruce Willis running down the runway, being chased by bad guys, or herds of helicopters slowly spiraling down from straight up. It is a little disconcerting to realize that nobody is looking out any window to check on things.

Come to think of it, with the helicopters anyway, all you have to do is lie down on your back and look straight up.