Have a Nice Flight
When an accident at a small airport caused mayhem and foolishness, a Texas Department of Public Safety officer tried to shut down the whole airport and ground Reddit user AjaxBU, who was a flight instructor. But the DPS officer was hopping mad when the airport manager gave the instructor the go ahead.
“Watching a few Texas DPS Officers realize they couldn’t shut down a whole airport.
I was working as a flight instructor at a small airport on a Saturday afternoon. We had one plane that had an issue on takeoff and veered off the runway, it cartwheeled and totaled the airplane but fortunately the pilot was not serious injured. I had a student who was next in line for takeoff when it happened, he called me from his phone as it happened.
I hopped in the airport car with one of the rampers and drove out to the plane with a radio to inform inbound planes to use the other runway (we had no control tower). On the way to the runway I called the airport manager who drove to the airport and on his way he made a phone call to officially close that runway.
About 30 minutes later a metric ton of DPS officers showed up and immediately tried to close the whole airport, treating it like a giant crime scene. They were carelessley driving around the airport like they owned the place, ignoring the planes that were moving around, and crossing our only open runway without regard to inbound traffic.
A mechanic and I tried to tell them to be careful and they got mad at us. One of them told me they were “locking it down” a couple times, meaning the whole airport. Now I was a broke flight instructor and I had a flight that afternoon that was ultimately going to help pay for me to eat that week.
The airport manager was a short stereotypical country guy, also former Navy. He was not intimidated at all by the cops trying to close his airport. When he showed up I was about to go out with a student who was preflighting for a cross-country. There were about 5 cops in the lobby, me with my flight bag, the airport manager, and a mechanic.
One of the cops saw my flight bag and said “I don’t know why you have that or why he’s out at the plane, you aren’t going anywhere”, the moment he finished his sentence the airport manager said “it’s one runway that’s closed, the airport is still open.” This angered the cops.
I was about to head out the door, and one of the officers said he was driving out to the disabled plane. Idky, the pilot had been gone for about an hour. The mechanic said “you need to be careful” and the cop quickly retorted “AND WHY THE HELL IS THAT?” and he said “because this is still an airport, and the first thing that hits you is going to be a propeller” a few seconds later a plane took off as one of the cars was approaching the runway intersection ironing in that point.
I walked out, and as I was hopping in the plane with my student the same cop came up to me and said “you aren’t going anywhere, we’re locking this down!” I looked at the airport manager who followed all of us out to the ramp, he said “have a nice flight AjaxBU!”
You could see these cops just fuming that they didn’t have the authority to close down an entire airport because one plane went off the runway. The airport had two runways, where the disabled plane was located was probably a mile or so away from the open runway. Why they were making a big fuss, I don’t know. The occupant was relatively uninjured, his wife was the worst thing he had to deal with that day, he told her he wasn’t going to fly.
We had a good flight, and I got to eat dinner that week.”