The North Little Rock Municipal Airport and the Camp Robinson airfield are considering getting on the same wavelength in the interests of safety.
One is a civilian airport and the other is an Arkansas Army National Guard airport. They have two separate and distinct missions but are separated by just 2.5 miles.
But pilots at the respective airports cannot communicate with each other because the airports use different radio frequencies. Officials at both airports believe that if the airports shared the same frequency, it would increase safety for pilots.
“Our concern is we never want to see somebody hurt,” said Maj. Stephen Brack, who is an instructor pilot for the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters based at Camp Robinson airfield. The aircraft is a twin-engine, medium-lift utility helicopter.
Brack and other pilots spoke at a public hearing the North Little Rock Airport Commission held last week to allow pilots to voice their support or objection to a proposal to have both airports use a new radio frequency that only they would share. The commission is scheduled to vote on the proposal at its regular monthly meeting Thursday.
Both airports lack an air traffic control tower, unlike larger airports such as Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field, which is on the south side of the Arkansas River. The controllers in the tower use vocal communication, radar and other equipment to control aircraft in the vicinity of the airport as well as on the airport’s ramps, taxiways and runways.
Most small airports, such as North Little Rock and Camp Robinson, don’t have enough traffic to warrant a control tower. Without controllers advising them of the positions of other aircraft, pilots at small airports rely on announcing their own positions and intentions on the airports’ respective radio frequencies to keep fellow pilots informed.
Special circumstances at the two small airports north of the river call for closer coordination and a radio frequency only those two airports can share, proponents of the change say.
Bob Connor, a retired airline pilot who has been flying out of North Little Rock for the past six years, said airspace restrictions often require pilots at North Little Rock to take off to the south and turn to the west.
Flying to the north often has to be restricted whenever military training is taking place on a large swath of Camp Robinson property. Last week, for instance, mortar training was conducted at the camp. Mortars fire explosive projectiles with short ranges but high arcs, with their projectiles reaching 5,000 feet or higher, well within the altitudes of the small aircraft that use the North Little Rock airport.
To the south is Clinton National airspace, which many pilots of small planes avoid because it is controlled by the Clinton National controllers.
Some aircraft based at North Little Rock that go west fly in the vicinity of the Camp Robinson airfield, where training and other missions are conducted, often right over the field.
Brack said that three times in the past year, he has been in a helicopter on final approach to Camp Robinson while practicing an emergency landing procedure using autorotation — which allows a helicopter to land without engine power — when he has had to abort the approach because of conflicts with aircraft from the North Little Rock airport.
Lesser conflicts are almost a daily occurrence, he added.
“What ends up happening, I’m standing on the ramp, as recently as today, there was an airplane that could not have been — it must have been at pattern altitude or slightly above it — but transitioned right over the center of the airfield with one aircraft getting ready to take off from our ramp and enter the traffic pattern and another a few minutes before that had departed,” Brack said.
Jerry Holmsley, who has been flying in and out of the North Little Rock airport for 30 years, agreed with Brack.
“I think as a safety issue the folks at Camp Robinson are spot on, that we absolutely without a doubt need to be on the same frequency,” he said.
Harry Barrett, the longtime owner of Barrett Aviation, which services general aviation aircraft and offers flight training at the airport, opposed changing the airport’s frequency, which is at 122.8, the common traffic advisory frequency for many small airports.
“We’ve had that frequency for as long as I can remember, and everybody in this whole area knows our frequency, and I think it’s going to lead to confusion,” he said at the hearing. “People are not going to be on it.”
When the new airport at Conway opened, it used a different frequency than the old airport.
“Right now, they are still having confusion over at Conway because they’ve changed their frequency,” Barrett said.
He also said that because other small airports in central Arkansas share the frequency, it is easy to keep track of traffic at other airports, especially when a pilot might be flying to them.
“When you take off out of North Little Rock and you can hear somebody’s traffic, if you’re going over to Bryant or to Carlisle or somewhere over there, or Stuttgart, you can hear traffic rather than have to switch later and miss a call,” Barrett said. “When you get out of here, you can hear other traffic in the area, so it kind of gives you a headsup to what’s going on at other airports.”
But to other pilots, that radio traffic they hear from other airports is a distraction.
Don Adamson, the owner of 92nd West Aviation, which is opening a flight school at North Little Rock, said that “122.8 is a very cluttered frequency.”
“Sitting on the ground … you can’t hear all of the radio calls. But at 1,200 feet in the air, at pattern altitude, you hear the whole state.
“Whoever is 122.8, you can hear them, at least on my radio, in my airplane. I say ‘hi’ to buddies in Saline County and that’s 40 miles away from Carlisle.”
The confusion at Conway is overblown, he said, adding that an official at the new airport said, “Yes, there’s some teething problems, but it’s working.”
Connor’s research shows that there were nine airports within 40 miles of the North Little Rock airport that shared the 122.8 frequency.
“On the ground you don’t hear it that much, but at pattern altitude, you hear all of the airports surrounding,” he said. “When you’re trying to make a position call coming into this airport [and] somebody else is talking in Saline County or Country Air, you can’t hardly get a word in.”
Brack said that clutter was why Camp Robinson wanted a “discreet” frequency that only the two airports would share — 123.075 has been proposed.
“We just want to see us get on the same page,” he said. “You do get a lot of traffic chatter on [122.8]. And if you’re doing flight training in a traffic pattern, teaching traffic pattern stuff, the more congestion on that radio that there is, the more difficult it makes to get good, quality training in.”
With a discreet channel, Brack added, “You can monitor the frequency so you can be prepared. You don’t have to make a radio call, but you can monitor so you know what’s going on over there.”