It's to bad, the DOT of NJ took over KVAY a few years back, made a lot of fuss about working with GA business to keep it open. All the old airfield owners, the ones that loved General aviation all are gone and it was pretty much easy pickens for the next of kin to swoop in and sell off the land.
I haven't been into the Flying "W" for a number of years. I'm wondering how any flight schools will remain open with the economy as it is. I haven't had a new student in two years. Where Monmouth Airport at one time had an airline operations and three flight schools with full time instructors operating a total of 9 training aircraft and an additional 15 aircraft for rentals between them, now there is no airline operations, one flight school, no full time instructors, operating two training aircraft with one additional aircraft for rentals.
wow.......that's not sounding too good.
kenmarson still has 5(i think) instructors, and 8 or 9 aircraft. the problem i'm going to run into though, is that they;re down to a single 172, whereas they had 4 when i joined the club. 38RE is due to be out of the club next month, which'll leave me with only the 152, or i'll need to transition to the pipers. my only concern with transitioning to pipers, is that although they pretty much fly the same, i've seen and read about people that've done that, and if/when they had an incident, it was partially due to that. they were also in the same hour range as myself(approx. 200).
the "W" still has their own flight school there too, but i don't know how many instructors they have. then finally, there is helicopter flight services, also located on the W. they were run out of VAY too. i think they have 4 or 5 instructors, and 3 Schweitzer cb300's of different variants.
i forget the name of the company managing VAY now, but they just seem to not be willing to work with people. when steve schneider owned the place, it was a fun place to be, and to fly to and from. now, there's less friendly people there, the ramp, used to be so full, there were aircraft parked on the grass....now 1/2 of them are gone. they're making no real improvements at all there, although they did finally take down 2 rows of really nasty hangars.
