The College Park Airport is the world’s oldest, continuously operating airport. The first plane to soar even a mile into the air took off from there. The first woman to ever ride in a plane took off from there, too. And before Sept. 11, the runways handled more than 50 flights per day.
With post-9/11 security restrictions, that number now is about five.
That’s because the airport sits inside of what’s known as the Flight Restricted Zone, which stretches from Reagan National in what’s roughly a circular pattern around the D.C. area.
Airports in Bowie, Gaithersburg, Leesburg, and even Fort Meade are all just outside of it. College Park sits a couple miles inside that circle, though, which means anyone flying in and out of the airport has to go through a lot of security protocols, including background checks and finger printing, that pilots going to those other airports don’t.
Now the airport is hoping to adjust the restricted zone by just a few miles so the airport can be opened up to more traffic here in the future.
“There’s about 400,000 pilots in the United States — general aviation pilots — and we only have access to about 3,000,” said Leroy Sommer, manager of the airport. “That really limits our ability to have good revenue.”
Even moving the FRZ in to make the airport available to all 400,000 pilots around the country would have a negligible impact on the small, single-engine planes that only occasionally take off and land now.
Sommer estimates it would only mean another one or two flights every day. But aviation technology is changing, commercial drones are coming, and that’s the future he wants the airport to be a part of.
“We’re going to have electric, unmanned helicopters, vertical takeoff and landing, other aircraft that’s going to be electric,” Sommer said. “We need to have a change in our security posture that we have in the FRZ. By moving it about two miles south of us, or a mile south of us, even, it would give us access to all that. Otherwise … we will lose out of any economic capability because of it.”
Right now, Sommer and the airport are just beginning to try to build community support for this project. Initially he was hesitant about speaking too much so as not to jeopardize that process, like what happened when a commercial carrier announced it was going to use the airport to fly people to New York City without going through the proper protocols.
Getting these changes would involve convincing a long list of different local, state and federal agencies from reflexively saying no, while also getting Congress to consider the issue.
“We understand security requirements more than you can believe, and we understand what needs to be done to make sure the nation’s capital is safe, and we would never want to cause a situation that would cause another possibility of a 9/11,” he said. “But I believe, with technology and what we have in the aircraft nowadays, and the ability to monitor and surveil what we have that would never happen.”
Sommer was adamant that any change wouldn’t mean turning College Park into a mini Reagan National or BWI-Marshall International.
Additionally, with the airport owned by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which draws support from taxpayers in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, increasing revenue at the airport would then free up tax dollars on other projects in the region, too.
“We need to be looking forward from the standpoint of what’s going to happen with flight, especially vertical takeoff and landing, electric flight, all that,” Sommer said. “So we have to be on the cutting cusp of this. If we just sit here and let it happen, then we’re going to be left behind.”
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