Business View Magazine | March 2020

222 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 the most important economic engine for the State of West Virginia.” That type of innovative thinking and creativity at Yeager has had another interesting iteration, recently, as Keller and his colleagues have attempted to replace the decline in commercial and general aviation operations with more military uses at the Airport. He explains, “Through the FBO, we have a contract for military fueling. And that has led us down an exciting path. In the last year, we’ve had over a hundred different squadrons come to the Airport to fuel and train. There are coal mine sites in southern West Virginia, large surface coal mine sites; most of them have been reclaimed, but some are still active. And it kind of led into talking to the Navy and Marine Corps about what kind of training they have for their helicopters. We found out that they have to do a lot of landing in a dirt environment. And in North Carolina and Virginia, they don’t have anywhere to do that, so they’re flying out to Arizona or