Airport Advisory Board - Regular Meeting

Let's call the meeting to order and start with an invocation that Mr. Boyd will focus.

Yeah, absolutely. Heavenly Father, we just love you so much, and just thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to serve. And, Father, I just pray that you will guide us and direct us, our words. I pray, Father, that you give us wisdom to make good decisions. And, Father, again, I just pray that you give us an opportunity to be a blessing to someone today. In Jesus' name, amen. Pledge.

I pledge allegiance to you. Roll call.

Terry Crawford. Here. I apologize for my lateness. Randy Klein.

Here.

Kevin Reed. Thomas Smolin. Thad Boyd.

Here. All right. We have a consideration of June minutes that were emailed. Do we have any corrections or additions? And if not, a motion to approve them.

I'll move for approval.

Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. All right. Unfinished business? There's none. New business? Matt?

The master plan project is coming to a completion. We've got our consultants here from McFarland Johnson, Robert Overby, and Gavin Feinstock. They're here to make a short presentation. And without further ado.

Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having us here. My name is Gavin Faunistock. I'm the Southeast Planning Manager with McFarland Johnson. And we are coming to the completion of the airport master plan and so we wanted to present some high level findings that we had during this process and share what we came up with for a plan for future development. So with that I wanted to go through a couple of items.

Sorry. Okay.

So I'm going to cover a few items within the master plan. The master plan is a very comprehensive document. It would definitely take a lot more than five minutes to go through every piece of it. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the forecast, facility requirements, some of the alternative concepts that we had developed, and then the capital improvement plan. And then end with showing you what that airport layout plan is going to look like in the future. So I definitely understand it's very small text here, but the pictures on the right tell the story. What we found during this study was that there's a lot of strong growth, economic growth within the area that is driving more and more demand at the airport. Now, to be clear, when we were doing this master plan, we were focused on the existing types of operations at the airports. So we're looking at operations of aircraft and based aircraft at the airport. Now, it's not that we didn't look at things like commercial service or cargo or other future kinds of development. We were focused on the forecast with those two areas. And what we found was the operations are continuing to grow over time. There's historical trends which supported that. And so we were able to forecast forward a little bit under a 4% growth rate, annual growth rate for the planning period, which is about 20 years. What that does is it brings you to a little over 200,000 annual operations in that 20-year time frame. Now, definitely understanding there can be some ups and downs within that period, but this is just an average growth rate during that time. Similarly with base aircraft, we see the trend continuing to grow in the base aircraft, which was going to drive demand for more facilities at the airport for parking and housing those aircraft. In addition to that, kind of the perfect storm, we have growing operations, but we also have a change in the fleet mix at the airport. What that means is that the types of aircraft landing at the airport are changing and they're starting to get bigger. That drives a lot of the development at the airport to need to change. So some of the infrastructure needs to change as far as the runways and the taxiways and just the size of the pavements as well would need to be modified over time. And so what we have done throughout the planning process is identify what those critical needs are and then plan them accordingly over the short, medium, and long term so that we could implement them in a staged manner. In the facility requirements we really dive into all of the different areas of the airport but we look at them kind of individually so that we aren't focusing in on one specific area and that drives development in the other areas. So we looked at the airport capacity and this was really a critical piece of it because of the growth that we were able to identify in the forecast. That airport capacity is going to start reaching a level where the FAA indicates you need to start looking at capacity improvements in order to accommodate it safely. And so we have looked at some capacity improvements to help separate traffic but then also provide additional facilities so that aircraft can get around each other. For the runway system, we have two runways at the airport now. But one of them is what's considered a crosswind runway. So it's not aligned with the primary runway and it's primarily used for smaller aircraft when the winds are shifting. But we found that that crosswind runway is not needed for crosswind purposes. So right now it's just serving as a secondary runway. However, if we were to realign that runway in the future, then that would actually improve the capacity of the airport because you wouldn't have converging runways anymore. On airside facilities, we looked at some future technology as well and facilities around the airport that would accommodate that growth that we're having. And so we're looking at things and citing things that may not be needed today, but we want to reserve that space in the future since I'm sure you know airport facilities are very expensive and they take a long time to develop, but they also take a lot of space on the ground, but then also in the airspace around them they can have impacts. For landside facilities, we wanted to make sure to accommodate this growth, and so we're looking at both sides of the airport right now, not just the side where all the operations are today, but we want to look at what we can accommodate in the future with landside access. And then, of course, the support facilities, which help run the airport. So things such as airport rescue and firefighting, making sure that we have a site for that, and we can continue to grow that as the airport grows. When we dove into alternatives, it's essentially taking our forecast and applying that to the facility needs to accommodate that forecast and then we'll come up with a few different options that we presented to the airport. And those options included some of those, sorry, the preferred options included things such as the runway extension. going to a little over 7,800 feet. A future parallel runway that I mentioned. The future parallel runway is really realigning that crosswind runway and giving us the ability to separate traffic. Realigning the taxiway, so the primary taxiway next to the runway does shift a little bit and so we'd realign that so that we have a straight taxiway and it has all the correct offsets from the runway. relocating some navigational aids. This is really important because those navigational aids have critical areas around them that really limit development. And so by relocating these nav aids, we're able to open up development around the airport. And then we've identified as well some additional developments such as hangars, potential site for cargo facilities, and potential sites for maintenance or repair shops on the airport as well. All of this really culminates in the capital improvement plan. That capital improvement plan takes a phased approach to implementation of these different developments that were identified, and it places them into a short, medium, and long term planning plan. Short term being the first five years, medium term being the five years after that, and then the long term being 10 plus or 11 plus years beyond that. We came up with an implementation strategy, so breaking down those developments into achievable and financially feasible projects, and we phased them over those short, medium, and long term. That also provides the airport with flexibility in shifting the priorities as things change at the airport. We did identify critical implementation, so critical projects that would need to be implemented in that time, and some of those include a new parallel taxiway, Charlie, rehabilitation of the runway, relocation of those navigational aids that I mentioned, construction of that parallel runway that would really allow separation of traffic and allow faster flow of traffic at the airport, and then some long-term projects such as cargo facilities and maintenance facilities in the future. Once we have those pieces put together, we then developed the capital plan with the funding requirements. So we estimated costs of all these developments and we were able to apply that over time and identify different funding sources that could assist with that. And so all of that really culminates here into the airport layout plan. The airport layout plan does two things. It shows you everything that you have existing today, but then it shows you everything should all of these improvements be done, what the airport might look like in the future, and it kind of provides you with that blueprint for development.

May I interrupt? Yes, sir. Is there a place for an additional T-Hanger campus?

Absolutely. So if you actually look kind of at the top section there, so it's going to be the green and the yellowish color. But those small areas there. We don't have it on this. I don't find it.

There's a T-hanger canvas on there.

It's shown.

Yeah, but what would have to happen before that can be constructed? So nothing before then?

There are a few different facilities on the south side, not T-hanger facilities. So to get to the T-hangers on the other side, then it would be hardly.

That could be decades from now. No?

have Charlie installed in the next year and a half.

All right. Or can we build a connector taxiway? The only other way to do it is maybe it doesn't have to be that wide and that's wrong for small aircraft. Maybe you could get them to pavement that way.

What grants would be necessary to build more T-hangers?

They're making a large push on investigating hangars throughout the entire state, querying all the different airports, collecting all of their T-hanger wait lists information.

What is our T-hanger wait list now?

35 people, I think.

How many, 35?

And we have to qualify that. A lot of times we offer T-hangers to people that are first on the list, and they're not ready to pull the trigger on it yet. So we've passed over five or six before we find somebody that's ready to move into one. Yeah.

So we're not willing to set aside any on the east side of the –

We didn't look on the east side for T-hangers right now. Our campus is built out. It's possible we could add a few more if we do some stormwater work and redirect some of the stormwater, and maybe we can do some T-hangers adjacent to our existing campus. But right now we're out of room on the east side.

Well, we're not completely out of room if we – It's a question of priorities, you know, whether we prioritize private hangers over the possibility of T-hangers. It's a policy decision, you know, because you've got area that you could say, well, rather than commercial hangers, we're going to set that land aside for T-hangers. Which, I don't know. I recognize that commercial users are ready to go and they're private money and we don't need FDOT money to do it. What's your feeling about it, Matt? You'd rather keep it commercial hangers on the east side of the...

We have existing corporate users on one side of a taxi lane, and we've got small aircraft users on the other side. And so you've got large aircraft mixing up with smaller aircraft, and the uses aren't so much compatible with each other. I prefer to keep the T-hangers close to the other smaller aircraft users and So all the larger corporate stuff all stays corporate in that general vicinity. The taxi lanes are built. Yeah, of course. The width-wise and the infrastructure to accommodate those design group two and three type aircraft.

But if they go up there in the northeast or northwest, they'd be mixing with heavy commercial traffic if you've got possible cargo handling. You'd have large aircraft over there.

I guess they're an imperfect. Yeah, there's no, I mean, we could wipe the slate clean and start over, but the other aspect, we have to look at how, it takes about a year right now to get to the top of the list. That's not a bad wait time, even at 35 people.

If you remove 2-6, 8-2-6, then that would open up T-hanger development north of north side.

There could be some areas on the north side we can look at doing that. The runway protection zones for both runways, the existing and then the future parallel kind of interfere with that type of development immediately north. But north of the aeroplex, there are some additional hangars over there. That's something we can certainly look at. Instead of doing corporate in that vicinity, we can change and put a couple rows of T-hangers in that area too. That's a possibility. And that would be quick. We can do that. So if we're not ready on the west side and there is a strong demand for T-hangers, that is an option.

All right.

Good.

Okay. Sorry to interrupt.

Oh, not at all, not at all. Happy to talk through anything. This was everything, kind of crammed into a very short period. So if you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Could you explain the methodology on analyzing our existing crosswind operations and how that is justified?

Sure. So the way that the FAA determines if a crosswind runway is necessary or eligible is by looking at about 10 years' worth of wind data. And if you have more than 95% wind coverage on your primary runway, then you no longer need a crosswind runway because it's essentially saying 95% of the time an aircraft can land no matter what the size and we do look at the different crosswind components which essentially relates back to the types of aircraft and we were able to find that we have more than 95% coverage on our primary runway and so therefore that crosswind is no longer eligible, no longer necessary. The eligibility piece of it is a little bit of a question mark. The FAA will continue to support it for minor repairs right now, and then it may become an FDOT-funded project if needed. But ideally, we look at realigning it. And you can see that on kind of the page north, the smaller runway there is for those smaller aircraft to kind of separate that traffic. And then one other thing I did want to point out is on kind of the page left there towards the top, we did reserve space for a potential commercial service terminal. While we didn't dig into what commercial service would look like at the airport, we wanted to ensure that the space was reserved in case that that becomes a reality and we need to look at building it in the future.

When you speak of realigning 826, what would the numbers be? Would it be a north-south?

So it would be a parallel runway. So it would run parallel to our existing primary runway.

It's more of a move and replace kind of deal, right?

YEAH, SO THE TERMINOLOGY IS, I'M TRYING TO PUSH THE TERMINOLOGY TO A SPECIFIC CATEGORY WITHIN THE F.A. FUNDING WORLD. SO IN REALITY ON THE GROUND WE WOULD BE DIGGING UP THE RUNWAY AND CONSTRUCTING A BRAND NEW RUNWAY. NORTH SOUTH. YEAH, AND IT WOULD BE NORTH SOUTH, YES.

THAT RUNWAY HAS BEEN THERE FOR I GUESS 60 YEARS OR MORE. THEY HAD WIND STEADIES AT THE TIME AND I'M NOT SURE HOW THEY DID THEM. today with computers, I guess it's much more of an exact science, but that's what showed the need for that runway from historically and the alignment of it.

Absolutely, and those things will change. Every five years when we do wind studies, we'll get a little bit of a different response out of them or a different answer that comes out of it. It also depends on back when that runway was considered or built. was there enough wind data locally or did they have to use nearby wind data in order to determine if it was needed? That's true. Yeah, so.

I assume the wind data from today would be much more precise than the wind data from 60 years ago before computers and everything else that we had. Yes, sir. We had to almost stand out there with a wind sock.

Yep. Yeah, we were able to collect a lot of good wind data and then the FAA has a tool that you plug it all into and it kind of does the analysis for you on it. All right, anything else? No, not from my side. Any other questions, I'm happy to answer them and we'll be here afterwards if you have more.

Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, next is resolution to accept FAA airport improvement grant to design taxiway alpha holding bay in the amount of 178,558.

Yes, thank you. So this particular project was identified in the master plan process and we didn't want to wait for the master plan to be finally approved by the FAA before we pursued this particular project. There we go. So this is going to help the efficiency of departing aircraft. There are times when we have so many airplanes lined up to depart on runway 36. There might be eight or nine of them packed in deep just waiting. There's no place for them to get around. If they're ready to go, they have to wait in sequence to depart. This holding bay will allow aircraft to pull over, do their run-ups. It'll allow other aircraft to pass by if they're ready to go ahead of the other aircraft. So we pursued this with the FAA. We justified it, worked with our consultants to submit the grant paperwork. This is the design grant from the FAA, $178,558, and I'll show you backwards. Here we go. I don't see there's a pointer on this, so I'm going to walk up.

You have a laser pointer.

Okay. Oh, that's it? This is going to work? No, that's a little bit better. It doesn't show up on the TV. All right.

Technology.

Everybody, we tried. So the whole thing is this area breaking.

staff request your approval motion I move to approve second all in favor aye aye all right next second amendment to agreement with McFarland Johnson so C and D on the on the agenda there I'm gonna speak to both of them at the same time we have two consultants are CCNA or competitive Consultant negotiation act consultants right our engineers of record We went out for selection several years ago the master agreement allows for I believe two Extensions, this is the second extension for each additional year for both McFarland Johnson Who are the consultants doing the master plan among other planning projects at the airports? And then infrastructure consulting and engineering who are doing, they've done quite a bit of design and construction projects on the airport for us. So I'd be happy to entertain any questions. Staff recommends approval.

Do we have any motion to approve the two amendments?

I'll move to approve both amendments.

We'll have a second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. Airport director's report.

Okay, we'll go down the list. The FDOT pond relocation, we've got the task work order from our consultant. We're going to advance that, put it in front of city council for their approval here shortly. That's relocating the pond off the end of the new road that we just built and that'll allow for the road to continue all the way to Southwest 60th Avenue. On the Mouser, RPZ Runway 36 grading, we are still waiting for the grant to come in from the FAA on that particular project. On the terminal apron rehab, We're 99% complete on that. If you've been out to the airport, you've seen there's two areas on the main ramp that are coned off. We're waiting on lids to come in from France for those concrete vaults. They hold the electrical connections for the FBO to implement their ground power units out there. So the lids are literally coming in from France, and they're backordered. On the master plan, you just had the update on that. The Alpha 9 driveway is close to completion in design. It is in permitting. They're submitting to Swift Mud for the stormwater permitting. This was designed by our city engineers, staff engineers. The T-Hanger Campus Rehab, that's with permitting still. Alpha 12 infrastructure, we just received the swift mud storm water permitting on that. So we'll need to start looking at how we're going to fund that particular project. It's about $2 million of flat work, but we're already seeing some corporate interest in participating in that development on the south end. The concrete pads are tied with the T-hanger campus rehab. That's all going to get bid at the same time. That's in permitting. TaxAway Charlie Phase 1. So a grant request was made to the state on the funding of Phase 1. We're refining that based on the feedback that we received from the state. They want more job information on what TaxAway Charlie will bring to the area as far as number of jobs. Not just construction jobs, but overall how it's going to open up the entire west side of the airport. So we're refining that. air show planning is going really well. Our planner is in town this week and he's making connections and he's meeting with hotels, the tourism board, police and fire to solidify their support and identify exactly how we're going to use them. We'll have a much more in-depth presentation on how that air show is going to look at next meeting, the layout, crowds, all that information. We'll have a lot more to present at that time. It's April 30th, May 1st, and May 2nd of next year. And then fuel and ops. IF THAT SCREEN IS NOT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT'S TOUGH TO READ. OPERATIONS ARE DOWN A LITTLE BIT COMPARED TO LAST YEAR. ON THE FUEL SIDE, THOUGH, WHILE WE DIDN'T SET ANY RECORDS, WE'RE STILL TRENDING REALLY WELL ON THE YEAR. STILL DOING REALLY WELL. I'D BE HAPPY TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS.

ANY FOR MATT? ALL RIGHT. THANK YOU.

WHAT IS THE TEAHANGER REHAB Other than putting the white stripes at the hangars.

It's a mill and fill of the asphalt area that serves the T-Hanger campus.

So it's not the buildings itself.

No, it's all pavement.

Okay.

Now the concrete pads will remain. Those are in good shape still. And we're going to stripe them for you, Mr. Crawford. Thank you. You're welcome.

There's reason for being on the board right now.

Got to get stripes on the ground. I can't back my airplane in without a stripe.

Are there any persons wishing to appear out there? All right. Any comments from board members?

No, I apologize for my lateness. I was at a doctor's appointment on 200. I'm lucky I made it today.

You're excused. Yeah. Thank you. You can thank Dad Boyd for the state of 200.

Yes. If it wasn't me, it'd be somebody else.

Yeah, that's right. I always blame Steve Gray, but he's dead now. All right. We have a motion to adjourn?

I'll so move that we adjourn.

All right. Thank you. We're so moved and all in favor? Aye. Aye. We're adjourned. Thank you. Steve Gray.