Court Opinion

ID: 9698977
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 20:05:47.680326+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:45.070255
License: Public Domain

McAULIFFE, Judge,
dissenting.
I cannot agree that the Congress of the United States intended to pre-empt the right of Carroll County to impose the conditions at issue here, and I do not believe that the United States Supreme Court held to the contrary in City of Burbank v. Lockheed Air Terminal, Inc., 411 U.S. 624, 93 S.Ct. 1854, 36 L.Ed.2d 547 (1973). In City of Burbank, the Supreme Court dealt with a city ordinance that prohibited jet aircraft from taking off from the Hollywood-Burbank Airport between 11 p.m. of one day and 7 a.m. the next day. This ordinance affected a regularly scheduled flight of a commercial air carrier that originated in Oakland and was scheduled to stop at Hollywood-Burbank before departing for San Diego. The Court held that “airspace management” had been pre-empted by the United States, and that the City of Burbank regulation invaded the field of “air*376space management.” The Court noted the findings of the trial judge that:
The imposition of curfew ordinances on a nationwide basis would result in a bunching of flights in those hours immediately preceding the curfew. This bunching of flights during these hours would have the twofold effect of increasing an already serious congestion problem and actually increasing, rather than relieving, the noise problem by increasing flights in the period of greatest annoyance to surrounding communities. Such a result is totally inconsistent with the objectives of the federal statutory and regulatory scheme.
The imposition of curfew ordinances on a nationwide basis would cause a serious loss of efficiency in the use of the navigable airspace.
Id. at 627-28, 93 S.Ct. at 1856-57.
The case before us does not involve scheduled airline service, or a public use airport. It does involve a small, grass airstrip from which one or two powered aircraft operate to tow gliders into the air. This airport is privately owned. It is not proposed to be a general aviation airport. It will not be open to other aircraft wishing to land or take off. The conditions imposed by the Carroll County Board of Zoning Appeals will not “increase congestion, cause a loss of efficiency, [or] aggravate the noise problem,” as was the case in City of Burbank. Id. at 628, 93 S.Ct. at 1857.
The Woodbine Airstrip is not a “public use airport” within the coverage of the Aviation Safety and Noise Abatement Act of 1979, 49 U.S.C.App. §§ 2101 et seq., because it is not a “public airport,” a “privately owned reliever airport,” nor a “privately owned airport which is determined ... to enplane annually 2,500 or more passengers and receive scheduled passenger service of aircraft.” 49 U.S.C.App. § 2202(a)(18).
Although all aircraft, including those operating from the Woodbine Airstrip, are subject to certain Federal Aviation *377Administration regulations, there is no control tower at Woodbine, and no direct Federal Aviation Administration supervision of the operation of the airport.
As the Supreme Court has pointed out, the implied preemption of this field by Congress must necessarily be very broad. Notwithstanding that breadth, I do not believe that it extends so far as to preclude the local imposition of conditions upon the grant of permission to operate a facility of this type, where airspace management is not implicated.
I concede that the majority opinion of a sharply divided Supreme Court in City of Burbank may be read as expansively as the majority of this Court suggests. I do not agree that such a broad reading is mandated, or reasonable as applied to the facts of the case before us. I would hold that the imposition of conditions two and three was a valid exercise of the authority of the Carroll County Board of Zoning Appeals.