They are red herrings because the airports in question are invariably LESS noisy and LESS polluting than they were when the fake NIMBYs willingly moved next doo

They are red herrings because the airports in question are invariably LESS noisy and LESS polluting than they were when the fake NIMBYs willingly moved next door to them. This is through decline in the number of operations and the technological advancement of the planes themselves. Compare the noise and pollution of a radial-engined plane to that of a modern fuel-injected plane with electronic ignition. The "safety" hysteria is easily debunked when you compare aviation accidents near a given airport with the automotive accidents on ONE major street nearby. Santa Monica is another example here, with not one neighbor of the airport killed by a plane crash in a century... while car crashes on the street adjacent to the airport kill (on average) a person every year. Yet this airport will likely be shut down and destroyed after an illegal (Brown Act-violating) back-room deal was struck between an outgoing FAA administrator and the SM city council. Another favorite lying tactic is to cite, for example, "11 crashes in the last 12 years at such-and-such and airport," but when you look at the accidents you find that they were nowhere near the airport; they're falsely cited because the plane LEFT from that airport or was headed there. That's like shutting down O'Hare because a plane from there crashed in Iowa. And as noted, iconic Meigs Field, which sat on an island posing zero threat or even annoyance to anyone in Chicago, was destroyed at 3 a.m. by Mayor Daley. This asshole had city fire trucks aim their spotlights at the webcam on the field to hide what he was doing. And what was he doing? Stealing an irreplaceable resource from taxpayers because downstate IL politicians used it... and he didn't like them. But his excuse to the public (three years after 9/11) was that he'd heard that people were worried about a small plane crashing into a building. This is the kind of corrupt trash arrayed against our thousands of public-use airports across the country, just when aviation advancements have picked up speed and the light-aircraft industry has attracted large amounts of investment and attention. Not to mention the rest of the trash: local politicians taking payoffs from developers and pandering to land speculators. Nobody wants lead. But lead is going away. We didn't dismantle the interstate highway system to get rid of it from cars, so we sure as hell shouldn't dismantle our national aviation system to get rid of it from planes.