Warren County Memorial Airport is making preparations for expanding the facility, which will occur after the construction of the new four-lane to Woodbury is complete.
Once that happens, plans are to close down a section of the current two-lane road in front of the airport and route traffic around to the new four-lane. The current runway will then be extended by 500 feet allowing the airport to accommodate larger aircraft.
“In the years down the road when the new four-lane opens and we’re able to close this portion of the two-lane road that runs between the two pieces of airport property here, there will be a 500-foot asphalt extension,” said airport manager John Patterson. “This will gain us another 500 feet of takeoff space, but it will gain us 800 feet of landing area. That seems kind of weird but I’ll explain it to you.
“We currently have a 300-foot displaced threshold on the approach to runway 23,” Patterson said. “And that’s because of Highway 70 located between the two pieces of airport property. We have to keep the airplanes high enough on approach so that as they come over the highway there’s plenty of buffer space between the aircraft and any tall trucks that may come through. So with closing the road, we get 500 feet of asphalt runway plus we get rid of the 300 feet of displaced threshold and we can handle larger aircraft based on our runway size.”
According to Patterson and Airport Commission chairman Joe Lane Howard, the facility has managed to obtain and move the many tons of earth necessary for the expansion with minimal expense to county taxpayers.
The first project was to construct a runway safety area on land the airport owns across from the current runway.
“We had originally put this project out thinking the appraisals we got for the project cost, from what our engineers said, around $450,000,” Patterson said. “Which was a significant savings on what it would actually cost to do this project had we brought in all this fill-in from off site, which is what we ended up doing.”
But thanks to a bit of cooperation with the company doing the four-lane, these costs were considerably reduced.
“When we put the bids out we got some bids that came in around that area, but we got one that came in at $235,000,” Patterson said. “So we had a considerable savings on top of what we thought we were going to save anyway. We were able to save a significant amount of money by using that contract, but at the same time, we were able to accomplish a tremendous amount of work that we previously wanted to do, but didn’t know if we could do it.
“But while we had the RSA crews on site doing that project they had the equipment and extra material from the highway project they were working on that we ended up getting, and it’s not been appraised so I can’t give you an exact dollar amount, but I estimate we got $1 million worth of work for $235,000,” Patterson said. “So we came out really, really well.”
The RSA project was required because of the airport runway expansion.
“The RSA is a federal requirement for airports of a certain size and we are increasing our size to the point that we need it,” Patterson said. “The runway safety area is a 1,000-foot flat, level, compacted runoff for an airplane that might overshoot the runway coming too fast. We’d have this area just to roll out on and be able to slow down.”