I am opposed to the expansion of O'Hare International Airport, though probably not for the reasons you think. I am also opposed to the construction of a new airport in Peotone, though I'm sure you'll find my reasons frustratingly practical. Illinois already has three major airports serving the Chicagoland megalopolis, four if you count the one in Milwaukee. Why not start running the three airports—Midway, O'Hare, and Gary/Chicago—as if they were one? Why not continue the upgrade of the DuPage airport to support commuter traffic? For a relatively low cost per mile, we could build a limited-access monorail system to connect the four airports and squeeze out economies of scale for years to come. A spur could even be run to downtown Chicago to connect with Meigs Field, the Metra, and the passenger rail station.
First of all, an airport in Peotone is retrograde—old time—reinventing the flat tire, that sort of thing. It would be of the same type and style as the airports of the 60's, where large and small aircraft are thrown together, in a dangerous and inefficient mix. Passenger terminals would still dump everyone into the same congested mess as we now have at O'Hare and Midway. The only difference being that all of that congestion would now be in the middle of some cornfield, where amenities such as hotels, food, and entertainment are scarce. No one would be even remotely close to their intended destination, or to alternate transportation facilities should the airport close, as it's bound to do many times a year on account of storms.
O'Hare handles more than 100,000 passengers a day at times. To transport them all to Peotone would require many hundreds of drivers, driving thousands of miles each day, burning thousands of extra gallons of fuel, and wasting hundreds of thousands of man-hours just to get to and from the airport. Do the math on the extra daily cost. It is staggering, and every penny of it is pure waste. Yet, in "politician think", building such an airport would create thousands of new jobs, but they would consume, not produce. This added daily burden to the already harassed passenger would cut air travel even further, in an already overburdened market. Is there anyone out there in Chicagoland who would like to add another hour or two to their before-flight time?
Mixing large and small aircraft at the same airport is dangerous, and inefficient. Commercial pilots, who fly into O'Hare, report having seen small aircraft damaged by jet blast, or even flipped through the air with the resultant total destruction of the plane and death of its passengers. In the air, it can be even more dangerous. In order to keep an eight-hundred-thousand-plus pound 747-400 aloft, lift must be created by a large difference of pressure on the bottom and top of the wing. The high pressure on the bottom of the wing bleeds around the wingtip to reach the low pressure on the top of the wingtip. This gives a "wingtip vortex", sometimes known as wake turbulence. This horizontal tornado is strong enough to destroy a small aircraft in flight, and can turn even a large aircraft upside down in some cases. Because of these dangers, aircraft on final approach are spaced farther apart, when a small plane follows a large plane. Times up to four minutes are suggested for takeoff, when a commuter follows a "heavy" into the air. The result is a waste of time, fuel, man-hours, and resources. And to what end? To compensate for an unfortunate mix of large and small aircraft.
The proper way to solve this problem, is to separate the commuters from the "heavy iron." Our best chance for this was lost, when the Glenview Naval Air Station was shut down and lost forever. All is not lost, though. DuPage airport between West Chicago and St. Charles has been recently upgraded, and has room to expand enough for commuter operations. A limited-access monorail could connect to O'Hare and on to Chicago, where it would join with a spur to Midway. The airports would be linked, the aircraft separated. Air traffic congestion would lessen at O'Hare, as would car traffic congestion. The need for expanding O'Hare would disappear, and the savings from the cancellation of the O'Hare expansion alone would probably pay for a large portion of the cost of this newer, safer, less congested alternative.
This same sort of thinking has to be applied elsewhere in the State of Illinois. Our entire transportation policy here in this state needs to be reviewed. We need to prioritize and privatize as much as possible. The issues of Amtrak, the high-speed rail proposal, ethanol subsidies, an interstate for western Illinois, and the level of tolls set by the Tollway Commission should all be part of a comprehensive review, with input from the state legislature, the governor's desk, the Illinois delegation to the Congress, county chairmen, mayors, and vital business interests. Take Amtrak, for instance:
Is this a boondoggle or what? A law passed in 1997 would have required Amtrak to stand on its own two feet by the end of 2002 without further largesse from the taxpayers. Instead, because of an increase in demand following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Amtrak is stepping up to the public trough—requesting $3.2 billion in emergency funding, plus another $35 billion in loan guarantees. Does this make any sense to you at all? The airlines get a $15 billion handout on account of a drop in demand, and Amtrak gets emergency funding because of an increase in demand? George Warrington, then president of Amtrak, said calls for his company to attain self-sufficiency in the wake of rising demand are "impractical and irrational." It just makes me want to sit back and scratch my head. How in the world did the likes of Commodore Vanderbilt or John D. Rockefeller or Bill Gates ever manage to succeed without government assistance? Such impractical and irrational men!
On the other hand, as a recent editorial in the Peoria Journal Star pointed out, "there are a number of reasons to support (subsidized) rail service. Trains are an important economic stimulus for cities like Galesburg, Macomb and Kewanee that have no air service. Amtrak may be the only travel option for some students and some elderly, and for those too poor to own a car. Trains conserve fuel and open space, compared to highways, and relieve congestion on roads. Rail lines could be a vital transportation resource during a national emergency; ridership increased after September 11 when air travel was paralyzed and Reagan National Airport was closed."
But then again, we live in a world of limited resources. The Journal Star speaks of helping "some" students and "some" elderly. How many? At what cost? Where are they located, and what are their options? Priorities need to be ranked. Costs need to be calculated. Benefits have to be assessed. We can't just provide something because some people want it, nor even because they need it. Somebody has to pay for it, and what do these somebodies forego when they pay the taxes so that "some" students have a way home from college?
And what about a mega-regional airport downstate? Now this might make sense. There are nearly three-quarters of a million people living within an hour's drive of let's say Lincoln, plus excellent connections on existing freeways. Why do we need fledgling airport operations in Peoria, in Bloomington, in Champaign, in Springfield, none of which make money, when we could build a serious airport with international flights to serve the huge downstate area?
Other questions: Why haven't we built an interstate to serve western Illinois? Why haven't we finished the bypass around Peoria, the only major city in the state with only one interstate link? Hell, LaSalle-Peru has two, Champaign has three, Effingham has two, Mt. Vernon two, but Peoria only one.
Why are we subsidizing ethanol, but blocking drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? The ANWR is a bleak, desolate coastal region, not the scenic area depicted by radical environmentalists. The proposed coastal drilling area is 2000 acres, about 1/10,000 of the ANWR, which itself is barely one-thirtieth of the State of Alaska. This is analogous in size to a briefcase on a football field or a computer disk in a large, four-bedroom house.
And what about subsidizing ethanol? Archer-Daniels-Midland, the US agricultural processor that has promoted ethanol as a boon to US corn growers, has been quietly buying surplus European wine that is turned into ethanol for the US market—taking advantage of subsidies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Now don't blame ADM; what they're doing is perfectly legal. Blame Congress and blame the EU. The US taxpayer is being duped, as well as the US corn grower. The EU props up wine prices by buying huge vats of low-quality wine from massive overproduction in Spain, Italy, and France. This ocean of wine is boiled down to remove the water, and the resulting brew—95% pure alcohol—is then auctioned off a few times a year, typically at a loss. It's then shipped to El Salvador and other Caribbean Basin countries, where it is converted into commercial-grade ethanol. The imported ethanol is sold to domestic distributors—who benefit from a tax break worth up to 54 cents an ethanol-gallon—and is mixed with gasoline for retail sale. So much for helping the Illinois farmer.
And what about those tollways? The drivers in the collar communities are griping about a proposed doubling in tolls. So what. Let 'em gripe. Libertarians have always favored user fees over income taxes. Why should downstaters be soaked with higher income taxes so upstaters can have a freeway. I think Cal Skinner's wrong on this one, dead wrong.
And let's talk some more about the so-called energy crisis. The fact is, the more energy we consume, the more we're able to produce. This is the unspeakable truth, so obvious as to be silly. In fact, the entire history of life on Earth has shown it to be true—the better one gets at extracting energy from the environment, the better one gets tomorrow. It's a chain-reaction process, and it spirals up, not down. It's called life. Humans are especially good at this game, but plankton and cows do pretty well at it too.
Living plants still capture solar energy about three times as fast as we humans are able to dig up dead green plants in the form of fossil fuels. And although we'll overtake the rest of nature in the not too distant future, it won't be long now before we get to the point where we, too, can take much of our energy directly from the sun. There's certainly plenty of solar energy to spare—green plants currently capture only about one-three-thousandth of the solar energy that cascades for free onto the surface of the Earth.
But whether we catch our solar energy live, or dig it up in fossilized form, or dig up uranium instead, is really just a detail. The one near-certainty is that energy consumption will continue to rise, not fall. We have 200 years of industrial history, 20 thousand years of human history, and 4 billion years of biological history to go on in making that prediction. In the grand scheme of things everything we think we know about "running out of energy" is not just wrong—it's the exact opposite of the truth. The more we capture and burn, the better we get at capturing and burning still more.
I want to thank pilot Bruce L. Green, retired 747-400 Captain for his help on the aerodynamics of flying and his invaluable insight into the small aircraft/large aircraft dilemma.