According to The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), every certified airport must have a Runway Safety Area (RSA). The requirements of the RSA range from “120 feet to 500 feet in width” and “240 feet to 1000 feet in length beyond the departure end of the runway.”
In order to meet the FAA’s requirements, we would have to take those distances out of runway our current runways. While the smaller runway 14-32 only requires 300 extra feet in length, the larger runway 6-24 will require an extra 1,000 feet in length.
Runway 6-24 is the only runway Jackson has that can permit jet traffic. If we were to take out the length needed to meet the FAA’s requirements, then Jackson would no longer be able to have jets fly in. In order to fix this problem, runway 6-24 is going to be decommissioned and a new runway will be constructed runway 7-25.
Construction engineer Ben Hoover told us that phase one of six will officially begin in April and will end next year in May.
The airport also has an enormous impact on Jackson’s economy. According to airport manager Ken Maurer “the annual economic impact of the airport upon the local economy is $18,000,000.”
This number does make sense, since Jackson is in the middle of many major cities and is only 24.4 miles away from Michigan’s International Speedway. However, with every project there are costs. Airport manager Ken Maurer explained “the total project costs over the past 15 years is $49 million dollars.”
Finally when asked to sum up everything that is going on at the airport, project manager Dan Kehoe had this to say, “We’re under going this project to bring Jackson County Airport up to standards to better Jackson for years to come.”
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