Thursday - October 13, 2011

Oops

Opening new terminal is a ‘defining moment’

Monroe Louisiana - Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo couldn’t help but smile as he toured the new Monroe Regional Airport terminal one last time before Monday’s official grand opening.

The grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony for the new $35 million Monroe Regional Airport Terminal is at 4:30 p.m. Monday.

“It’s going to be a historic day for the city of Monroe,” Mayo said. “It’s an awesome moment for all of us. It’s emotional as well because we’ve worked so hard to get to this point. Without question, it has been the No. 1 project during my administration. It’s very gratifying to know this will change the gateway into and out of Monroe and the entire northeast Louisiana region.”

The first flight at the new terminal is scheduled to arrive at 8:17 p.m. Tuesday. The first flight out will occur at 6 a.m. Wednesday.

“The first set of passengers who fly into Monroe will probably be shocked when they get off the plane and walk through the loading bridges and come into a brand new facility,” Mayo said.

Today:

Missed connections

Monroe Regional Airport officials learned Tuesday passenger loading and unloading bridges at the new $36 million terminal are not being able to connect to airplanes.

Airport director Cleve Norrell confirmed Tuesday afternoon that some of the loading and unloading bridges at the new terminal appear they will not be able to connect to some of the airplanes.

He said airport officials are working to determine what caused the problem, if the issue resulted from a design flaw during the construction process or if it was a result of an error on the city’s part.

“We are checking them out to see what the problem is, but it looks like some of them will fit and some won’t fit,” Norrell said. “We’re not sure what will fix it right now, but that’s what we’re working on. There are a lot of variables, but we’ll know when we try to put them up to the plane. We’re working to remedy the problem.”

Oops. Still, it’s just a bit of a glich. I’m sure another couple hundred thou can fix things right up.  But the real falling short to me is how they spent the money in the first place.

From what I can find out from visiting the “>airport’s homepage, it seems that about two dozen significant commercial flights a day flow through this airport, mostly going in and out of Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. Wiki tells me they have 3 runways, with the longest one being 7500 feet. That limits this airport to jets smaller than the A320 and modern 737 size; they can fly the old MD-80s and the tiny corporate jets, but that’s about as big as they can go. If they’d spent some of that $35 million on upgrading and lengthening the runway to about 9000 feet, then they could have perhaps grown into a regional hub. Once upon a time Delta was centered out of here, but they moved on to bigger and better airports long ago. To be a playa in the major airport game you need to be able to land the widebodies, and that means long runways built strong enough to fly the heavies. At the very least you need to build to handle the mid-size planes like the A320 and the 737, which make up nearly 1/3 of all native flights, even to make a decent financial go of it. If you can’t do either then you may as well hang Maggie’s Drawers on a pole as a windsock, because your airport will forever just miss the target.

But hey, I’m sure the 900 passengers a day who use the main terminal will be impressed. For $35 million, they damn well ought to be.  So good luck to Monroe Regional. And yes, “are not being able to connect to airplanes”, because grammar and writing skills are apparently no longer required to get a degree in journalism.

Monroe is the 8th largest city in Louisiana, located in Ouachita Parish in the northern part of the state, with a population of about 50,000. 3 miles east of town and only 79 feet above sea level, Monroe Regional Airport has two 5000 foot strips and one 7500 foot strip. During WWII more than 15,000 navigators were trained there.

Below the fold: a partial solution?

Posted by Drew458     on 10/13/2011 at 01:59 PM   
Filed Under: • Government • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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