Business View Magazine | December 2020

259 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2020 LUMBERTON MUNI C I PAL A I RPORT approved for a new fuel farm with two 12,000-gallon tanks; one for 100 low lead and one for Jet A, both of which will have self-service capability. Right now, there is no easy 24-hour way to fuel aircraft. Snuck reports, “We have Life Light Air Ambulance helicopters coming in after hours to fuel their helicopters, so it is a priority to have the self-serve fuel farm. With a new system and a new charge card machine that will be all state of the art, it will be so much easier. Duke Power, the State Patrol, and Duke University Hospital all want to be using our facilities with this.” “We are also going through the process to be an approved testing centre with PSI to give pilot examinations,” Snuck continues. “We will be doing all the written examinations for the FAA. Then there is the Emerging Technology Institute who have 17 people ready to take drone examinations right now. This company is a subcontractor to the military, and they are interested in doing a lot of drone activity here at that to DME, Distance Measuring Equipment, which is a measuring device using ground and air components to determine the slant range of an aircraft to a point.” This is first item on the “need to do” list. There is a priority list, of course, but Snuck has many ideas about the direction to take. He notes, “We will do the ILS and then we are also doing a substantial project with taxiways. We are creating a partial parallel taxiway for runway five. That’s going forward to approval in January for funding from the Bureau of Transportation and it will extend the parallel taxiway down to the approach end of runway five. This is something we have been planning for about four years and we are planning the same thing with runway two three. A full parallel taxiway is required by the FAA, if you have instrument approach with minimums that are less than one mile, which we do have.” Lumberton Airport has also had the engineering