Chesterfield County Airport Opens New Taxiway

The project has been in the works for more than two years.

Trudeau:  Airport projects take a while.  In this one we had take a break this winter because you know we had a pretty unusual heavy winter here in the Richmond area.

Tom Trudeau is the Manager of the Chesterfield County Airport.  He explained that this taxiway is going to have a major impact on business there.

Trudeau:      The taxiway complex is really important because you can’t get to the runways without them, and they are utilized by aircraft to get to the ramps and aprons and the hangar complex in the back out to the runway in back.

The airport’s taxiway complex is more than twenty years old and it needed to be rebuilt.

Trudeau:  As part of that process we also installed a new connector taxiway to the north ramp.  Without that taxiway we weren’t able to really fully utilize that north ramp.  The large aircraft can’t turn around easily.  We needed that taxiway to be able to able to cycle through, so to speak.  It is also gives connectivity to our based aircraft here from the hangar complex in the back.

But, Trudeau said, perhaps the most important thing is…

Trudeau:  …that we got more weight-bearing capacity out of it.  In other words, we can operate heavier airplanes on this taxiway system than on the old.  That’s important because the aircraft that frequent her,e some of them need to go to the west coast and some need to go to Europe and all of those things require a large, heavy load of fuel and you gotta have a taxiway to support those heavier airplanes.  So now we do, and we hope the next improvement will be a runway extension to give us that capability so aircraft can use us routinely to go anywhere in the world.  We’re looking forward to that in the next couple of years.

Chesterfield County Airport doesn’t handle the commercial passenger jets that fly in and out of Richmond.

Trudeau:  We are a general aviation airport, which means everything.  We’ve got what we call puddle-jumpers, air knockers, we’ve got the Piper Cubs and the Rocket Chance here.  We’ve got some of those small single engine airplanes that folks fly both for recreation and for their business.  But we also got the jet traffic, including some heavy jet traffic.  We get all the Gulfstream series, I, II, III, IV, series, here, the Global express, an occasional business jet, which the Boeing business jet is a pretty large airplane.  We get those once in a while but infrequently because we haven’t had the weight-bearing capacity.  We hope to see more of those in here in the future.

The airport’s role in the area, Trudeau pointed out, is as a reliever airport for Richmond International.

Trudeau:  What we’re supposed to do is relieve them of the general aviation traffic so they can concentrate on the heavy commercial traffic, the scheduled airlines that you see come and go.

Richmond, he said, is a great commercial service airport and that’s good for Chesterfield.

Trudeau:      We think when the economy turns that they’ll have more traffic there and that’s good for us because then they’ll have more need for a Chesterfield county to be able to take those other aircraft.

In addition, he pointed out…

Trudeau:  It’s got a great location.  We’re right off 288 and only a, I think four or five miles from I95, so it’s easy to get to.  We’re at the juncture really of 10 and 288.  If folks want further information, you can get everything you need to knowby going to flychesterfield. com.

The taxi way project was funded largely by just over two million dollars in federal and state money.  Congressman Forbes helped to get a weather observation system reconnected that had been out of service in Chesterfield for some 20 years.

John Ogle, WCVE News.