- November 18, 2024
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Flagler County’s airport — the busiest of its kind in the state, and the third-busiest in the country — needs a new runway, airport staff told Flagler County commissioners at a Monday-afternoon workshop.
“We have a capacity issue at the airport,” Flagler County Airport director Roy Siegert said. “And the FAA said, when you’ve reached 60% capacity, you need to find ways to fix your capacity.”
The county airport is actually well over that, airport master planner Doug DiCarlo said, because the airport evaluated its operations based on numbers from 2012.
“The master plan was based on the 2012 year — you have to pick a base year for your data — and that actually was a very slow year for the airport,” he said. “The actual capacity at the airport has been well above 60%.”
In 2011, according to documents provided to county commissioners and available HERE, the airport was at 70% capacity.
To determine what the airport needs to deal with the increasing load, staff evaluated information on the kind of planes using the airport.
“We collected some very, very detailed data from the fairly new air traffic control tower, specifically to find what type of aircraft is coming in here, because that directly equates to requirements,” DiCarlo said.
In 2012, the airport had about 153,000 takeoffs or landings, he said. Staff expect that number to increase to about 244,000 by the end of the airport’s 20-year planning process in 2033, a forecast approved by the FAA.
“And as you can imagine, when you work those numbers out to the end of the forecast period, we can certainly see 100% capacity at the airport,” DiCarlo said.
The only feasible way to increase the airport’s capacity, he said, would be to add an additional runway parallel to the current one. It could be fairly close: The two runways would only have to be 700 feet apart from centerline to centerline.
DiCarlo didn’t specify a timeline for adding the new runway, but said that in the meantime, staff could plan for it by setting aside land for the runway and not building other structures on it that would eventually have to be moved.
Diagrams presented to the commission and available in the backup for that meeting HERE show different possible placements for the new runway.
