PEORIA, Ill. — A couple of upgrades are coming soon to General Wayne A. Downing Peoria International Airport.
The Metropolitan Airport Authority of Peoria met Friday in a special session to accept and execute a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration and Illinois Department of Transportation.
The grant helps to reconstruct the northeast general aviation ramp and to begin preliminary design work for westward expansion of the air carrier apron.
“[The general aviation ramp] serves three different corporate tenants, and it’s basically worn out,” said Director of Airports Gene Olson.
“It was built a long time ago, it’s seen pretty heavy usage, and the pavement’s wearing out.
“It’s right adjacent to some hangars, so you can’t just overlay it, because if you do that, you raise the pavement up above the level of the hangar doors, and you’ll get all kinds of rain coming inside the hangar,” he explained.
“So we have to excavate out the existing pavement, dig a little deeper, and then build the pavement back up to the strength it needs to be, and keep the grades the same.”
Olson said he expects that process to begin in the spring of 2020 and to take a full construction season.
The expansion of the air carrier apron, he projected, should take a matter of months.
“You have to paint lines on the pavement for the airlines to come in, and you see the marshals with the orange flashlights, waving the airliners in,” he said.
“Right now, we’ve got those airplanes spread as far as we can, we can’t spread them any farther because there’s not enough pavement for them to park on.
“So we need to expand that apron a little bit to the west so we can move airplanes to the west, and then spread the ones in between out in case we get larger aircrafts our way.”
The grant covers about $1.5 million of the $1.8 million needed to complete the project.
The remaining money is scheduled to come from the Airport Improvement Program.