Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Most voters in Kalispell probably have made up their minds on the airport expansion referendum. But as election day approaches, the campaign continues building to an ugly crescendo that will ring in the community’s ears long after the ballots have been counted.
Today we learned that airport expansion backers set up a pro-expansion website under the name of the anti-expansion group Kalispell Quiet Skies. Such punkings are not unheard of — Democratic U.S. House candidate John Lewis received one from the GOP a few weeks back — but they’re underhanded, corrupt public discourse, and unworthy of serious adults.
Questionable charges of fraud also corrupt public discourse — and regrettably, such charges have been made.
On 20 October, InterLake reporter Tom Lotshaw reported that Kalispell city officials were pushing back against insinuations by airport expansion opponents that high estimates of airport operations (takeoffs and landings) were not only wrong but perhaps not entirely honest. Nine days later, Lotshaw reported that airport manager Fred Leistiko, believing he was libeled, filed a libel lawsuit against Kalispell councilman Phil Guiffrida III:
The complaint against Guiffrida was filed Tuesday in Flathead District Court by attorney Connie Leistiko, Fred’s wife.
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The complaint alleges that Guiffrida — acting as a private citizen and not in his capacity as a council member — made false, defamatory and malicious statements about Leistiko with reckless regard for the truth, in part accusing Leistiko of giving false and deceitful information to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2005 for the purpose of misappropriating federal funds.
The complaint is based on email statements Guiffrida made about a proposed airport project to other City Council members, the city attorney, city clerk and city manager and by his own admission has made in public to other people.
According to the complaint, Leistiko may add names to his lawsuit:
14. Defendants John and Jane Does 1-10 are others who may have defamed the Plaintiff in concert with and in a similar manner to the actions of Defendant Guiffrida, whose exact identity will be determined through discovery, after which the names of those Defendants will be changed by amendment according to the Montana Rules of Civil Procedure.
Before Leistiko filed his complaint, Lotshaw reported that city council candidate Chad Graham, who spearheaded the petition drive putting the airport expansion issue on Kalispell city election ballot this fall, raised the possibility that the wide differences in estimates of annual operations (takeoffs and landings) might have nefarious orgins:
“Are we just talking about bad math? Was a number transposed or is something else going on? Was this fraudulent? How did this number get arrived at? They can’t both be right,” Graham said about the past estimates and the actual count.
Whether Leistiko’s lawsuit is a strategic lawsuit against public participation (a SLAPP suit), intended to stuff a sock in Guiffrida’s mouth, remains to be seen. It’s certainly a brushback pitch worthy of Pedro Martinez. The most likely outcome? Probably a formal and humiliating apology of questionable sincerity in exchange for the dismissal of the lawsuit.
Graham and those sharing his views are on solid ground when they question the accuracy of annual operations forecasts of 40,000 or higher, but they’re way out on a limb when they raise the possibility that those numbers were cooked. In this country, people are innocent until proven guilty. So far as I can tell, no one has offered evidence that support allegations of wrongdoing — which is not surprising: disagreeing on estimates of airport operations is evidence of differing methodologies and assumptions, and nothing more.
Furthermore, it ought to self-evident, even to the opponents of expanding the airport, that engineering firms and their engineers take professional pride in getting the facts right, not to mention having powerful economic incentives to do so. The same holds true for airport managers and city officials. Defrauding clients and deceiving public officials leads to lawsuits, losses instead of profits, blackened reputations, criminal charges, and extended stays in the calaboose, .
To some extent, Graham and Guiffrida are engaging in campaign hyperbole, but that’s a plea in mitigation, not a defense for alleging fraud.
I find myself wondering how well some opponents of expanding the airport understand how baseline levels of operations for the Kalispell City Airport were established and projected 20 years into the future.
Let’s begin with a graphical presentation of the major studies of current and projected operations at the city airport.
The markers depict the forecast numbers. Through the markers are linear regression trend lines. Although operations are plotted as functions of time, they’re actually functions of various factors such as economics for which time is a proxy. The r-squared statistic indicates the goodness of fit. Although I've extended the trend lines in both directions, the extrapolations should be taken with many grains of salt.
The operations estimates made in 1998–1999 employ a much higher baseline than the estimate made in 2011 by Stelling. That’s because Stelling counted takeoffs and landings, and counted them several ways, while the other investigators estimated baseline operations by applying a multiplier to the number of based aircraft. Table 1 summarizes the differences.
| Study | Author | Year | Based aircraft counted? | Takeoffs & landings counted? | Independent operations counts? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Montana State Aviation System Plan (MSASP) | Robert Peccia Associates | 1998–1999 | Yes | No | |
| Terminal Area Forecast | FAA | 1999 | Yes | No | |
| 1999 Master Plan Update | Morrison-Maierle | 1999 | Yes | No | |
| 2012 Master Plan Update | Stelling Engineers, Inc. | 2011 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Sources: Chapter 4 and Appendices F and G of the Stelling study, and Chapter 2 of the Morrison-Maierel study.
Here’s how Stelling Engineers, Inc., at the beginning of Chapter 4 of the 2012 master plan, described its methods:
There are two … key elements for determining accurate and representative aviation forecasts for a particular airport: 1) baseline values for based aircraft, aircraft mix, local and itinerant operations, air taxi, and military operations; and 2) realistic expectation for rate of growth of each group. Of these two elements, determining the baseline data is both more critical and more difficult. Baseline aviation activity at the Kalispell City Airport was established from three … primary sources of information: 1) On-site data collection including based aircraft reporting, acoustic aircraft counts, and motion sensing photography; 2) the FAA’s Terminal Area Forecast (TAF); and 3) responses obtained from a pilot’s survey.
Stelling examined sales of aviation fuel, obtained operations counts from fixed base operator Red Eagle Aviation, interviewed pilots, and used a motion sensing camera, thereby obtaining numbers independent of the acoustic counter’s results. That enabled Stelling to adjust the raw acoustic count for equipment failures, abnormal weather, and even economic variables, to arrive at an adjusted baseline for current operations of approximately 13,300 operations per year.
That, Stelling found, was fairly close to the 15,800 annual operations produced by a 1989 formula incorporating based and itinerant aircraft, crop dusting and similar activities, flight instruction, and military use. Without knowing more about the 1989 equation, whether it has been validated recently, I can’t rule out the 15,800’s being a coincidence. Fortunately, the adjusted acoustical count is a solid number that serves as a defensible baseline for estimates of operations over the next 20 years.
Stelling’s study ran from 21 September 2010 to 20 September 2011. I’ve therefore combined both September samples into one column to provide a better visual representation of how many operations might occur in a typical September. I disagree with Stelling’s method for estimating operations in September, 2011, and thus think Stelling&rsqu;s number is a bit high but still not unreasonable.
Morrison-Maierle’s study is internally consistent, but unlike Stelling, which counted takeoffs and landings as well as based aircraft, it relied only on a count of based aircraft and a formula not well suited to the Kalispell City Airport to estimate operations as a function of the number of based aircraft.
According to FAA Advisory Circular 150/5300-13 Airport Design, in the absence of observed data, an estimate of 538 air operations per based aircraft could be used to estimate the total number of operations. 11 This is a total air operations estimate of 33,356 total operations, which agrees with the FAA Form 5010.
That method yielded operations estimates that were far too high, but so far as I can determine, the use of the method was consistent with FAA policy. But as Stelling’s results proved, there’s no substitute for counting takeoffs and landings over an extended period using several independent methods.
It would help, of course, if every flight required electronically filing a flight plan with the FAA, if all aircraft were equipped with GPS units that transmitted position data to the FAA, and if all airports had automated operations counting systems. The technology’s available, and there are sound homeland security reasons for employing it, but private aircraft operators are notoriously resistant to government regulation, and have legitimate concerns about cost, so accurate counts of operations at airfields such as the Kalispell City Airport are not readily available on a routine basis.
Previous Flathead Memo posts on the city airport: