Rob Propst, who served as manager of the Sedona Airport from 2012 to 2015, started as manager of the Cottonwood Airport on March 3.
“I’m happy to be here. I think this will be a positive experience,” Propst said. “I saw it advertised last June. The timing just didn’t work for me then. When I left the city of San Diego in 2019, my plan was that my wife and I would move back to Northern Arizona. Her dad had lived in Cottonwood for years. We’ve been coming here for 40-plus years. I called [retired Deputy City Manager] Rudy Rodriguez in November or December last year, said are you going to re-advertise, and they did, and I applied and here I am.”
Propst is currently living in the Village of Oak Creek while his wife is working on selling their home in Gig Harbor, Wash., where he was formerly manager of the Tacoma Narrows Airport.
“The two years I was in Sedona, I had a great crew,” Propst recalled. “I enjoyed being in charge of the entrepreneurial part of the business, running the FBO, the fuel operation and the catering. I met some great people, became a trustee in the Elks Lodge in Sedona and I intend to rejoin that.”
“I always thought I should fly over here when my father-in-law lived over here,” Propst said of his previous relationship to Cottonwood Airport. “But when I was still flying for the Marines, we would fly into Sedona, and he would drive up and have lunch with me and I’d fly back to El Toro in southern California.” His father-in-law used to live in the Verde Villages.
“He used to tell me, if they ever put a stoplight at [State Routes] 260 and 89A, I’m leaving,” Propst said. “They did, and he died. And there were no roundabouts in Sedona or Cottonwood back in those days.”
Propst is taking over an airport that has recently been the target of complaints by Cottonwood and Clarkdale residents who want the airport’s operations restricted due to noise.
“Airport noise is just a gift that keeps on giving. It’s always there,” Propst said. “This is my third week. I get emails every morning about primarily Embry-Riddle [Aeronautical University] and the number of planes in the traffic pattern and what time they start and what time they quit … In the three weeks that I’ve been here, Embry-Riddle has not done anything that violates the Federal Aviation Regulations. And they know that and the FAA knows that. My goal is to reach out to the leadership at Embry-Riddle flight operations and try to develop a rapport and ask them to ‘fly friendly’ and be better neighbors. But there’s no official lever to force them to do anything different than they’re doing. It would simply be an ask.”
Training Flights
“If you go on FlightAware or any of the flight tracking websites, any given day, looks like maybe four to eight Embry-Riddle airplanes coming and going. I was just able to get into the program that tracks the number of operations — an operation is a takeoff or landing — looks like in February we did roughly 7,600 operations. And the majority of those are Cessna 172 aircraft, and that’s what Embry-Riddle flies, and that’s what Sierra Charlie Aviation Academy down in Scottsdale flies,” Propst said. Each touch-and-go counts as two operations, and “the FAA says touch-and- goes are an approved aeronautical activity.”
FAA Rules
Propst said the city and airport’s ability to limit pilot access to the airport is restricted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“When you take the airport improvement program grants, the airport sponsor, in this case the city of Cottonwood, literally signs a contract with the federal government that says you’ll comply with all the 39 grant assurances for a period of 20 years,” Propst said. “If the FAA ever gave the city of Cottonwood — or when Yavapai County owned and operated the airport— federal funding to acquire real property, the caveat is, whatever real property was acquired with federal funding has to stay in an airport use in perpetuity. It appears that some of the ends of the runway, the runway protection zones and object-free areas, were purchased with federal money.
“I’ve been doing this over 30 years, and there are airports that haven’t taken the airport improvement program money for 30 years. The poster child is Santa Monica. The city of Santa Monica says ‘we have no contract with the federal government anymore,’ and they wanted to shut Santa Monica down, and the FAA said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ I don’t know of any airport that’s indebted to the federal government that’s been able to shut down.”
Arizona is part of the reason those rules exist. “Federal law has preempted airport sponsors from controlling airspace, and that happened in 1958 with the Federal Aviation Agency Act passed by Congress, which was a direct result of the two airliners that had a midair collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956, which essentially gave control of all the airspace and all aviation safety and safety management to the FAA,” Propst said. “Then, in 1990, Congress passed the Airport Noise and Capacity Act, which said you can limit airport operations as long as you meet these six requirements. It talks about being reasonable and not interfering with interstate commerce … No airport since 1990 has been able to meet all six requirements and impose additional restrictions.
“For example, Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena, which is the airport authority that controls the Burbank area, attempted to do that … and they petitioned the FAA to put a curfew in at Burbank. And if ever an airport needed a curfew, it’s Burbank. And the FAA said no. There are airports that have curfews, but they were grandfathered in because they existed prior to 1990.”
Noise
Some residents have asked that the city and airport request an FAA noise study of airport operations.
“A noise study is called a Part 150 study, and it really is more of a land use study that would generate noise footprints. Typically 65 decibels or community noise equivalent level, which is a day-night weighted average,” Propst said. “Fromthat, the FAA may — they’re not required, but they may — fund some mitigation. For example, if you’re inside the 65 [community noise equivalent level] decibel reading line, they might put more insulation in your house, they might put in double-paned windows. But they’re not going to use a Part 150 study to say because of the new noise footprint, we’re going to retroactively do something as far as zoning and land use.”
The FAA has found that the Cessna 172 produces between 61 and 63 dB of noise on takeoff and between 61 and 62 dB on approach.
Pilot Shortage
Some residents have suggested the Cottonwood Airport install an automated system to charge pilots fees every time they touched down. Propst questioned whether such an approach would have any effect on the number of operations.
“I suspect it won’t do that,” Propst said. “If I was running Embry-Riddle’s training operations, I would just build that into the cost of tuition for the student pilots.”
“Part of this is driven by the fact that there is an acute pilot shortage,” Propst said, adding that the shortage is expected to last another five to seven years. “People have an insatiable desire to travel. If you and I said today, let’s go down to Sky Harbor and fly to Paris, we could do that. If there aren’t enough pilots, we might not be able to do that.”
He contrasted pilot availability today with that of years past, when aspiring airline pilots had to work up through the regionals or military service.
“Some of the airlines are frankly paying students right out of high school to go to flight training and guaranteeing them a seat in an airliner once they get their commercial ticket,” Propst said.
The Cottonwood Airport recently lost its flight school, and Propst said that in the time he’s been in the position, no other operator has so far approached the airport about using the empty space. Other than noise, Propst said the Cottonwood Airport will be facing some maintenance and taxiway work, along with possibly moving the wind sock.
“The master plan looks at lengthening the runway by about 500 feet,” Propst said. The runway is currently 4,252 feet long. “That’s probably a number of years out … it simply is going to make the airport operating area safer. I don’t think that would change the fleet mix at all. If you have 5,000 feet of runway, that’s kind of a magic number because Netjets and Flexjets would look at this, then, as an airport they could service. They typically don’t come into airports with less than 5,000 feet.”
“Airplanes that are based here would increase if there were more hangers, ’cause there’s never enough hangars,” Propst added. “If there was more available aeronautical space to lease, I’m sure the city would be interested in leasing that to folks to build hangars.”
But, as he found out in Sedona, potential is no guarantee of development.
“Twelve years ago, we paved the taxi lane up there and more hangars could be built, but I drove up there last weekend before I went to church, and that taxi lane still doesn’t have hangars on it,” Propst said.
