At the airport

On Wednesday night I attended the monthly meeting of the Jasper County Airport Authority at the airport building. I was rather surprised that I was not the only member of the public attending. The Authority has four members. Also at the table were its lawyer, the airport manager, and the airport engineer.

Like most meetings, much of the time was spent on items that are specialized and of limited or no public interest. There were a few things that stood out, however.

July looks to be a very busy month at the airport. On July 5 from 11:00 to 2:00 the annual EEA Fly In will take place. The next weekend (July 11-13) the airport will have some role in the South Shore Air Show at Fair Oaks Farms. The Harrier Jet that will be in the air show may be based at the airport, and it may be on static display when it is not flying. And then sometime in July, hopefully not while the air show is in town, an agriculture spraying group (crop dusters) will spend three days at the airport.

There was a discussion of maintenance on the approaches to hangers that was mostly of interest to those who use the airport. The engineer for the airport, who is from NGC, discussed several things including the fuel farm. The long-run goal is to replace all of it, but in the short term the airport is installing new, high-flow pumps. At present fueling some of the planes can take more than an hour, which may not matter much in most cases, but when time is money as with the crop dusters, it does. Finally, there was a discussion of the FAA's top priority, "obstruction remediation." (Doesn't that have a nice bureaucratic ring to it?) Obstruction remediation involves installing some additional lights at key points and removing a few trees, some of which are on the south side of SR 114,

Because a post is not really complete without a picture, below is a picture of the airport runway. (It is the long white line near the top.) The now-closed Babcock quarry is the most easily recognized feature near the bottom. What else can you recognize?  My son took the photo on his flight from Indianapolis to Washington. (You did not know that Rensselaer is on that fight path? So was Minneapolis.)