Business View Magazine | November 2019

156 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2019 Atlantic Air Museum, which collects and actively restores historic war planes and classic airliners, as well as rare civilian and military aircraft, with a large number of historic aircraft on display. The Airport is owned by the Reading Regional Airport Authority, which has a seven-member Board of Directors appointed by the Berks County Board of Commissioners. There are 12 employees, consisting of an administrative staff and nine full-time maintenance workers. Sroka reports that the Airport has maintained its Part 139 certification with the hope that commercial airline service will return, one day, to Reading Regional. It has also continued to upgrade its facilities. It completed a major terminal renovation in 2000, anticipating airline growth at that time. There have been upgrades to runway safety areas in 2007 and 2008 and an EMAS project on runway 3/1 in 2009. (EMAS, or Engineered Materials Arrestor System, is a bed of engineered materials built at the end of a runway to reduce the severity of the consequences of a runway excursion.) This past year, there has also been some major work done on the Airport’s fencing and security camera systems. “Our last big runway project was in 2011,” Sroka adds. “We rehabbed and repaved our instrument runway 18/36 and two taxiways. In 2015, we renovated and rehabbed the south taxi lane between our terminal and some of our corporate operators. This past year, we did upgrades to our runway surface sensor system that we have on both runways to provide surface data during winter operations. We just received grants to do two major apron renovation projects on both the north and west apron – new overlays on both of those areas, next year. In our Master Plan, our goal is pretty much to develop the Airport as far as the taxiways and infrastructure; we’re working on some projects to do a full-length parallel taxiway to runway 13/31. We do have a section in there that was done back in 2001, and we never quite finished it. That’s one of my goals that will give us a full-length, parallel taxiway.” “In addition, we’ve been trying to develop more GA hangar space, as well as some corporate box-