Oneonta Common Council updated on city airport

The Albert S. Nader Regional Airport is shown Tuesday, June 6.

The Albert S. Nadar Regional Airport's master plan is what keeps the focus on constant improvement.

"This is not only just the airport, and what happens at the airport," Oneonta Airport Commission Chairman Martijn Kamerbeek said at the city's Common Council meeting Tuesday.

"This is bringing people to the city of Oneonta," he said. "This is bringing economic investors into this area. This is bringing people here who would like to go to our baseball camps."

Turner Bradford, aviation manager at McFarland Johnson, a Binghamton-based engineering and construction management firm, gave a presentation to the council on the airport master plan, last updated in 2015.

The master plan projects out "the potential use of your airport in the future, and what might you want to build to meet that use," Bradford said.

Bradford said that his group talked to the FAA about projects that the agency is willing to fund, including building a new taxiway.

The taxiway project was originally one project, he said, but the FAA didn't have enough money to fund construction all at once and suggested the airport make it two projects.

The airport has the bids on hand for half of the taxiway project and grant application prepared to submit to the FAA, which Bradford expects the FAA would fund this year.

Phase 2 of construction would be bid in the following year during construction on the first half of the taxiway.

Bradford also talked about two obstruction removal projects — one on airport property and one which the airport would require potential easements and seeking air rights from neighboring property owners — as well as relocating the entrance road out to the perimeter of the property line.

He added that the vision for the future of the airport includes the taxiway, which the FAA considers a safety issue.

"Few and far between are public-use airports without a parallel taxiway and certainly any airport that has jet traffic," Bradford said. "Jets don't want to operate on a runway without a taxiway. They want to exit the runway. They don't want to back taxi on a runway with another plane on approach."

What the airport has chosen to prioritize, Bradford said, are projects to open up the airport to leverage private development and attract people to use and house their aircraft at the airport.

An airport has limited ways to generate revenue, like leasing land, renting hangars and selling fuel.

The airport has a state grant in hand to move the fuel farm and install a new larger fuel tank, with the goal of selling more jet fuel at a lower cost, and a grant to move the weather station.

Councilor Len Carson said that the airport makes money through land leases, hangar rentals and fuel sales.

In the last year, airport hangars were at 90 to 95 percent occupancy, Carson said, and last summer the airport "did substantial fuel sales through helicopters that were working on the lines."

He said that by installing the new fuel farm, a full fuel truck can come from the port in Albany, rather than the partial trucks the airport currently buys due to low capacity.

"We can actually purchase the fuel at a much lower cost," Carson said, "and those profits would go from the city so we can generate more revenue."

Just having increased capacity doesn't mean higher fuel sales automatically.

Carson added that fuel sales were down in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a substantial amount of rain that occurred while the airport was working on the tarmac, which sustained weather delays.

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