10 days after this site’s article on the number of likely operations at the Columbia County airport, Richmor Aviation president has volunteered some different numbers for jet and turboprop operations. In the spirit of fairness, here is a re-running of the possible totals, based on his clarified figures for jets and turboprops from 2013.
Richards states that there were 361 jet operations (takeoffs plus landings) last year. Various County-commissioned reports and studies have variously pegged jet operations at 3%-8% of the total; Mr. Richards at a public meeting last fall estimated 3-5%. As explained in the prior post, it takes just a simple dose of highschool algebra to work out the total from the subset:
Though not explicitly stated, one can also infer from Richards’ update the number of turboprop operations, which are consistently estimated in the various County literature as 8% of the total airport activity. That yields:
Thus the low end of the jet estimates coincides closely with the turboprop estimate: 3,950 vs. 4,513. It thus seems reasonable to conclude, using only “official” sources and Richmor’s volunteered numbers, that the actual number is in the 4,000-4,500 range.
