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Economy isn’t slowing progress, plans at still-new airport in Saline County |
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Monday, 23 February 2009 |
The sluggish economy doesn’t appear to be slowing progress at the Saline County Regional Airport.
Two contracts were awarded recently to Spradlin and Co. for hauling dirt to make way for future hangar development.
The first contract is for scrapers to move dirt at a charge of $87.50 per hour, and the other is for off-road trucks to move dirt at a fee of $75 per hour.
“We’ve been going along as always planned,” Airport Commission Chair-man Mark Westbrook said of progress at the still-young airport.
“We’re trying to get more dirt moved for hangar and apron space,” he said.
Commissioner Gary Hunnicutt said, “We’ve been blessed things have gone as well as they have.”
The airport opened in 2007 off Ark-ansas 183 in Bryant.
Right now, there are 36 T-hangar spaces and 65 planes, Hunnicutt said.
The task of moving dirt and leveling the field is necessary to make way for the instrument landing system, which will provide a way for pilots to land at the airport even in inclement weather.
“The ground has to be filled and leveled for the antennae so it can work. The dirt is the ground plain,” West-brook said. “We should be finished with that in a couple of weeks if weather holds.”
Hunnicutt said the plan is to have the ILS completed and up and running by December.
An ultimate goal of the Airport Commission, the commissioners said, is to acquire corporate hangars. “With corporate hangars comes industry into Saline County,” Westbrook noted.
Commissioners in March will attend a Federal Aviation Administration conference in Fort Worth, Texas. Westbrook said they will learn how airports like the one in Saline County may receive money from the federal government’s stimulus package.
A project the commission would like to completed with stimulus money, Westbrook said, is adding another 200,000 square feet of asphalt onto the existing runway. Including engineering costs, Westbrook anticipates that project would cost around $750,000.
All of these things would help in the goal of attracting corporate planes.
Both Westbrook and Hunnicutt are confident the airport would qualify for assistance.
“We’d need to build ramp space where corporate people could come in and build large hangars,” Hunnicutt said. “Currently, we have a waiting list of 60 people in the Central Arkansas region who would like to have corporate space.”
He noted that all Saline County legislators and Cong-ressman Vic Snyder and U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln have helped secure funding for the airport. “They have done so much for us monetarily,” he said.
He added, “If it hadn’t been for Alcoa donating the land, we would still be behind Holland Chapel.”
The old airport was between Holland Chapel Baptist Church and the Saline County Fairgrounds in Benton.
“Our old airport was out of compliance and we’d probably be closed if [County Judge Lanny Fite] hadn’t been so instrumental in getting this new one built,” he said.
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