Is this unusual, or are other commercial airports doing the same.
Many airports around the country charge a landing fee. It typically is based on aircraft weight, with the smallest piston aircraft paying only $5-10 up to hundreds for larger aircraft. At larger airports, particularly where they really don’t want small planes to fly (Boston, SF, Chicago, for example), the fees for even the smallest planes is hundreds of dollars. As the story points out, it is insignificant to the charter flights and private jets.
I don’t have a problem paying landing fees when they are reasonable and are for the purpose of supporting the airport itself. But this is nothing more than a subsidy for the airlines…and that’s BS.
PBI is looking at expanding and adding a parallel runway. Neighborhoods were puttting pressure on PBI to start charging for GA, thus reducing GA traffic and maybe squashing the proposed expansion. I don’t know if that factored into this or not. Im sure the expansion is going to happen, but maybe PBI playing the good neighbor card.