Let’s hope you are both right about the FAA. It seems to me that the empty slots (18 might be most of the available transient parking at VGT) speak more loudly than either AOPA or FAA and I wonder if they sold any slots at all at those prices. I can’t find a diagram but recall 3 rows of 10 spaces, some of which are occupied by long term tie downs.
Let’s say they sold 100 landing fees at $3000 each, that’s $300,000. In comparison, here is the data for FAA airport funding. The state of Nevada as a whole got $35 million from FAA in 2022, much of it going to Clark County airports with e.g. Henderson Airport (the particularly easy to use one for GA) getting $2 million to do some repaving work. The main commercial airport in Vegas got $16.5 million from the FAA last year to do similar paving work. Jean airport, which is a County run uncontrolled field in the middle of nowhere got $200K to reseal the runway. Money talks, it’s the main source of FAA power, and getting FAA money every year is contingent on following FAA rules.
The great things is that the operations data is public, so in a few weeks, when the November data is uploaded we can look and see how many operations they actually got during the PPR period.
Silvaire wrote:
I understand the event is run in the middle of the night, for European TV audiences to watch after breakfast. I don’t see this lasting for ten years and it might be better for everybody if the participants and their fans stayed home and slept at night instead.
They couldn’t really make it work with the time difference. They held it as late at night as they felt was workable in Las Vegas, but it still meant the race started at 0600 UK / 0700 Europe which is hardly post-breakfast viewing on a weekend. Better would have been lunchtime in Las Vegas for evening viewing in Europe, but of course they wanted the race to be in the dark because it’s mainly a light show.
I doubt it’ll run for 10 years but they may well try. F1 is owned by Liberty Media and they are desperate to crack the US market, which has been tried before but has never really happened. The farce at Indianapolis in 2005 looms large, and they had a similar farce this time with a car being damaged by a loose manhole cover and a practice session consequently being abandoned, with fans seeing nothing and not getting a refund. One of the longstanding F1 teams – now US-owned – runs a US driver in their team because they think that’ll help them build a fan base, but unfortunately the guy isn’t good enough to get the car around the track and this minor necessity seems to have eluded them. There is one other US driver in F1, but he is a pay driver (his dad owns the team) and likewise would not be there on merit.
One of the (few) nice things about there being so much money in F1 is that the drivers are rich enough to say what they think without worrying about upsetting the boss. They seemed pretty united in their assessment of the merits or otherwise of the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
