Meeting in a room at Pike National Bank that faced the city’s former airport runway, the McComb-Pike County Airport Board announced it has received a $1.4 million Federal Aviation Administration grant to rehabilitate the airport’s current runway in Fernwood.
Besides the airport board, members of the Pike County Board of Supervisors, McComb Mayor Zach Patterson and Pike County Economic Development Board president James Wicker also attended.
Thomas Henderson of Neel-Schaffer Engineers, which handles engineering for the airport, announced the award during a Monday night meeting at the bank. The room faces Rawls Drive, which was previously a runway for the old McComb airport.
Henderson said the grant was part of the recently passed federal stimulus package.
“That will be 100 percent money,” Henderson said. “There will be no match.”
“In my experience working with airports, the FAA gives money to people who seem like they care — who want to be involved and who want to develop their airport in the right way,” he said.
Henderson said plans for the runway rehabilitation were already under way when the FAA approached airport officials about the grant.
He said Neel-Schaffer is completing the runway project design, adding that he expects to advertise for bids in April. Construction is expected to begin in May.
The rehabilitation project is the latest of several in the works at the airport. Contractors also are working on taxiway and apron expansions at the airport. All of the projects are either fully or partially funded by FAA grants.
“The FAA gives grants to airports that have projects that are ready,” said board president and pilot Dr. Larry Stewart.
“We always try to be two projects ahead so we can be ready when the FAA asks.”
Stewart and airport director Conner Burns said other projects — a second 300-foot apron expansion, a fuel farm upgrade and a runway expansion — are being planned.
The proposed runway expansion would extend the airport’s 5,000-foot runway to 6,500 feet to accept larger commercial aircraft.
“The runway extension is the key to get the type of traffic the airport wants to handle,” Stewart said.
The board got a view of the type of economic development that a strong general aviation facility can attract during a presentation prior to Henderson’s announcement.
Mike Hainsey, Golden Triangle Regional Airport executive director, and consultant and former Golden Triangle Airport Director Nick Ardillo, discussed the airport’s growth and its value as an economic development tool.
Golden Triangle is a regional airport authority formed by a coalition of the cities of Columbus, Starkville and West Point.
“Our vision is for the airport to serve as an economic development driver for the county,” Stewart said. “We’re trying to model ourselves after Golden Triangle.
“They have a pattern I think we can copy, because we have some of the same raw material they had when they started,” he said.
Small, general aviation facilities, Hainsey and Ardillo said, benefit corporations because they can fly small corporate jets and be closer to their plants.
“If a corporate executive is coming to see a site in your county, he’s not going to fly to New Orleans and rent a car,” Hainsey said. “He’s going to fly to your airport.”
The key for Golden Triangle, Hainsey said, was the decision by defense contractor American Eurocopter to build a plant by the airport.
Since then, the airport and the surrounding industrial park property has attracted several international industries.
As of 2008, they said, Golden Triangle and the surrounding industrial park have five industries employing 4,000 people and an investment of $3 billion.
“We have been very blessed,” Hainsey said. “We have been gaining jobs while other areas have been losing them.”
