Columbus-Lowndes County Airport is in the midst of a growth spurt.
To make sure that growth continues, officials are pursuing nearly $2 million in Federal Aviation Administration grant funding to repave its aging runway.
Fixed Base Operator Dan Duston, who runs the day-to-day operations, tells The Dispatch the airport is growing. Continuing that growth means it’s time to redo the 20-year-old paving on the runway.
According to the flight-tracking website Flight Aware, the airport, which is located off of Highway 69 South, has seen as much as a 200% increase in traffic for some summer months over the same period two years ago.
“A lot of that is just because somebody is here to provide good service when people fly in,” Duston said. “We’re starting to get a lot of repeat customers.”
Airport sees wide range of traffic
Flights at the airport run the gamut from medical to business to agriculture to people coming to take FAA-mandated tests, Duston said. PHI Medical has a helicopter hangared there, and the airport sees a lot of “transit traffic.”
“They’re flying coast-to-coast and our airport, like (Golden Triangle Regional Airport), is right underneath a major airway,” Duston said. “There’s less traffic here (compared to GTRA), so it’s easy to get in and out of. So we get a good bit of traffic that stops here to fuel up and go to the bathroom.”
Sometimes those visitors take the airport’s courtesy car into town to eat before leaving, Duston said.
On the agricultural side, forestry work brings in a good bit of business, Duston said.
“We have a lot of pine tree plantations in the area, north and south of here and into Alabama,” Duston said. “This time of year we have a lot of aircraft spraying pine crops to kill off the undergrowth, and it’s a big asset for us to be centrally located between their jobs.”
The airport even sees a handful of so-called “Angel Flights,” Duston said.
“That’s where you have a group of volunteers with planes who fly patients to hospitals for treatment, especially those who can’t travel commercially because of compromised immune systems,” Duston said. “We don’t see that every week, but we see it a good bit, especially since (the COVID-19 pandemic.)”
Additional services and enhancements
The airport has also been designated an FAA testing site, Duston said.
“As of April, pilots and student pilots who need to take a written FAA knowledge exam can take it here,” Duston said. “That’s great for us, because the next closest (testing area) is 100 miles away. Anybody at (Raspet Flight Research Laboratory at Mississippi State University) or in law enforcement can come here to take drone tests, for example.”
The airport has been on a bit of an expansion kick lately, adding the ability to sell jet fuel back in April and repaving the taxiway earlier this year.
Now, Duston wants to tackle the 4,503-foot runway.
The pavement is nearly 20 years old, according to Neel-Schaffer engineer Zach Foster, and just about at the end of its lifespan.
“It’s still functional and safe to use at the moment,” Foster said. “It’s in pretty good shape, as old as it is, but (the paving) is fatigued and there’s some block cracking.”
The estimate is about $1.8 million, Foster said, and the airport has pre-applied for FAA funding for about 90% of that cost. MDOT will cover 5%, with the last 5% — or about $89,000 — to be split evenly between Columbus and Lowndes County.
The airport should find out if the money is there either late this year or early next year, Foster said, with work getting underway next summer.
The airport is also trying to match an MDOT mutli-modal grant for a new 9,600-square-foot hangar, Foster said. The estimate was about $1.2 million.
The airport successfully got about $540,000 towards that project, but the funding is 50/50, Foster explained.
“We just applied for Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds from the FAA to help cover 90% of the remaining 50%,” Foster said. “Then the city and county will split the remaining 10%, which will come to about $30,000 apiece.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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