Town seeks help in airport expansion

MILLINOCKET – An engineering firm from New Hampshire soon will sign a contract and start helping expand Millinocket Municipal Airport to turn it into a greater community asset, officials said Monday.

Once it’s on board, Hoyle, Tanner & Associates of Manchester will start planning a 300-foot expansion to the airport’s main runway to make it more accessible to small multiengine jet traffic, improve runway visibility for pilots, and install new approach and runway lights and taxiways, Town Manager Eugene Conlogue said.

While the work will not turn MMA into an international airport – “we won’t be bringing in 727s,” Conlogue said – it is key to helping draw more high-end charter traffic from airports in Bangor and Boston.

“Given our location on the edge of the northern Maine woods, it may have value for people who would like to fly here,” Conlogue said Monday.

Don’t expect the airport to be transformed overnight. Conlogue estimated that the work will cost $1.2 million and take years to plan and get grants for from the Federal Aviation Administration and the state Department of Transportation.

Very little if any local tax money will go into the airport improvements, he said.

“We would like to do this as quickly as possible, but we would do it as soon as the money is available,” he said.

Hoyle, Tanner & Associates offers municipal, state and federal clients with civil, structural, environmental, transportation and aviation planning and engineering, according to its Web site, hta-nh.com.

Founded in 1973, the company has completed more than 12,500 projects and has regional offices in Portsmouth, N.H., Burlington, Vt., Westborough, Mass., Orlando, Hernando and Mount Dora, Fla., and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the site states.

Over the last three years, town officials have made airport revitalization a priority, buying hangars and getting a fueling system for aircraft.

The Town Council voted a year ago to accept an FAA grant reimbursing the town for 95 percent of the hangars’ $165,000 costs. The town paid about $4,500 of that purchase.