I’m writing to thank Richard L. Waters for his Jan. 28 letter supporting the resolution of the airport expansion controversy that the Concerned Airport Neighborhoods has been calling for.

In what no doubt was intended to be criticism of “strong objections” to runway extension and airport expansion, all the while praising incoming Green chief Kevin Dillon, Waters used the success Dallas has enjoyed since the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, known locally as DFW, began serving Texas air travelers. While he didn’t elaborate on exactly what prosperity Dallas has experienced, he did explain quite clearly the parallels between Dallas’s Love Field and Rhode Island’s T.F. Green.

Both airports are “located entirely within the city in a highly developed residential area,” as Waters describes Love Field, and both serve Southwest Airlines (in fact, Southwest is T.F. Green’s biggest single revenue source, one the Rhode Island Airport Corporation would be loath to lose). Love Field had gone through expansions and renovations, just as T.F. Green has done, until there simply was no more room — again, just like T.F. Green. Mr. Waters’s emphasis on the point that Southwest still flies out of Love, instead of relocating to DFW, underscores what Concerned Airport Neighborhoods and Southwest have both said in the past — that T.F. Green is sufficiently sized and patterned to adequately serve Southwest’s needs, and that a second, larger airport would not hurt T.F. Green’s business.

This situation is not unique to Dallas. Traveling as a convention delegate, in August 1997, I flew to Kansas City International, which, I assure you, is not surrounded by residential neighborhoods. En route to the convention/hotel complex, we passed the old Kansas City Downtown Airport, which was completely engulfed by downtown Kansas City’s multi-storied buildings — and still had planes on the runways. Already an opponent of runway extensions or expansion at T.F. Green, I was struck by the simplicity of this situation as an answer to Warwick’s airport problems.

Kansas City, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, wanted an airport with 10,000-foot runways but had the good sense to know this was not a viable option at K.C. Downtown. Instead, it built a new airport north of the city — not in the heart of the city — with that decision heavily influenced by the efforts of Kansas City Stockyards president Jay B. Dillingham, who, apparently, saw both the necessity and the value of an airport with the capacity to expand in the future.

The ride from KCI to the convention/hotel complex is longer than the ride from Quonset to Warwick, maybe even more than to Providence, yet the airport-related businesses (such as the convention/hotel complex) and nearby tourist attractions (the Harry S Truman Library and Museum, for one) all thrive. (The Rhode Island business community, by contrast, fears that the extra 15-20-minute ride will be the downfall of tourism and the travel industry as a whole.)

It should be noted that Mr. Waters mentioned that, “before [he is] accused of not being affected by a larger and better airport,” he and his wife “are in the process of acquiring property in Warwick” within two miles of the airport, with the intention of building a retirement home with plenty of room for their grandchildren. I believe that Mr. Waters has a limited understanding of what “airport-affected” actually entails. Mr. Waters will find that “airport-affected” is a lot more than that, and that everybody who lives in Warwick is airport-affected. Until that day comes, Mr. Waters should not consider himself to be airport-affected.

He is not.

DAN MURPHY

Warwick

The writer represents Concerned Airport Neighborhoods.