More construction work is being planned at Freeman Municipal Airport.
This time around, the project will focus on rehabilitating and changing the angle of the airport’s main taxiway.
Early this week, airport authority members voted 3-0 to continue with a $1 million project to rehabilitate taxiway A, which connects aircraft to runway 5-23, the airport’s main runway, for takeoffs and landings. Authority member Scott Davis did not attend the meeting.
There is about 2,300 feet of the taxiway left in need of work, airport manager Don Furlow said.
A portion was rebuilt two years ago as part of a larger project to reconstruct and strengthen runway 5-23 to allow heavier aircraft to land.
Furlow said the runway was constructed during World War II, when the airport was a military base used for pilot training.
Age and use have taken a toll, and the taxiway that parallels the runway is in the same condition, he said.
“We are attempting to have everything done to new specs that will allow heavier aircraft to operate on those areas, and taxiway A is a key area,” Furlow said. “We need to get it torn out and redone.”
When the old taxiway was built 70 years ago, it was designed for different types of aircraft than the airport sees today, Furlow said.
The goal is to strengthen the airport’s facilities to accommodate heavier, more modern aircraft such as cargo planes, jets and military aircraft. Furlow said the hope is that the upgrades will attract more business.
“We’ve seen some C130s out here, but we can’t take the heavier traffic because we can’t allow them to operate on the taxiway,” he said. “The configuration is old, and we don’t want that much weight on it until we can get it rebuilt.”
To improve safety, Furlow said, the design of the new taxiway changes it from a 45-degree angle to 90 degrees so that when a plane goes down the taxiway and pulls around to the runway, the pilot has a better line of sight to the end of the runway.
“It can be hard to see sometimes the way it’s set up now,” he said.
Although the project will go out to bid this year, construction won’t get started until next spring, officials said.
It will be about a 45-day project, depending on weather.
“It was questionable whether we could get a contractor in here in time to get the work done before the weather turns bad,” he said. “We didn’t want to start and not be able to finish.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is covering 90 percent of the cost of the project, with 5 percent coming from state funds. The airport will cover the remaining 5 percent.
Paul Shafer with BF&S Engineering said the FAA does not have any funds slated for the project this year, but there was a possibility some discretionary money would become available if other FAA-funded projects across the country come in under budget or don’t materialize.
Shafer said he didn’t think there was any risk to the airport by advertising the project now.
“We will get firm bids instead of an estimate and can ask the contractor to honor their price in the next construction season,” he said. “We feel it’s a good strategy to go ahead and advertise and get a bid in.”
Contractors aren’t hurting for work right now and already are starting to push jobs back to next year, he added.
After taxiway A is complete, Furlow said, the next project in the airport’s capital improvement plan will be to rebuild taxiway C to the new standards.