Boone County Regional Airport manager Judy McCutcheon (left) makes her monthly report to Airport Board members (from left) Lynn Keener, Blaise Koch and Bob Reynolds.
There were some new airplanes on the taxiway when the Boone County Regional Airport Board of Directors last met.
In July, Dalton Sullivan, a community affairs manager with SeaPort Airlines, told the board that any complaints the airline might have received about scheduling problems can be attributed to a lack of crew personnel.
Big airlines need pilots and recruit those with more experience from larger regional carriers, who in turn recruit from smaller regional carriers like SeaPort.
The problem isn’t peculiar to SeaPort, Sullivan said. It’s a nationwide problem.
Fewer pilots are coming out of the military now, he explained, partly because drone technology is more prevalent and fewer pilots are flying.
The International Air Transport Association maintains that the number of passengers worldwide could more than double, to 7.3 billion a year, in the next two decades.
Sullivan also said fewer new pilots realize that they will have to work their way up to flying for a major airline by flying shorter flights with regional carriers like SeaPort. He said that in his 16 years of previous experience with TWA, pilots without a minimum of 2,000 hours experience weren’t even considered for employment.
Airport manager Judy McCutcheon told the Daily Times that SeaPort had entered an agreement with Southern Airways Express to lighten SeaPort’s load due to the pilot shortage.
That agreement also helped reduce delays and cancellations of flights. Two airplanes were on the taxiway the day the board met, one going to Kansas City, the other to Memphis. One plane was fully loaded when it left the airport that day and others were in the airport lobby waiting to board.
McCutcheon told board members that the FAA wasn’t certain it would fund grooving of the new runway after it’s scheduled to be overlaid next year.
Most pilots at a meeting with engineers in August were in favor of grooving the surface, but it was especially important to FedEx pilots with their larger planes.
That would add another $300,000 to the total bill, but snow and ice melt faster on grooved surfaces and it reduces hydroplaning and take off/landing space.
McCutcheon said officials have submitted further documentation to the FAA in hopes it would seriously consider funding the effort.
The overlay project would be done in 2016, but it depends on FAA funding it, which would also depend on Congress fully funding the FAA as well.
McCutcheon said the fixed-base operator (FBO) at the airport had invested in new radio equipment that would allow them to monitor incoming airplanes 80 miles out.
That would let FBO staff that they would be needed to service an airplane needing to make a quick turnaround rather than the plane landing and no one know they needed service until that time.
Board members received the regular monthly report from the FBO, which showed it sold 13,819 gallons of Jet-A fuel and 2,482 gallons of Avgas for the month.
FedEx Freight boarded 52 passengers for 11 trip that month and purchased 6,389 gallons of fuel. SeaPort boarded 329 passengers and purchased 3,925 gallons of fuel, the report said.
Original article can be found here: http://harrisondaily.com
Two Southern Airways Express airplanes, one going to Memphis, the other to Kansas City, were boarding passengers as the Boone County Regional Airport Board met recently.
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