Business View Magazine - Nov 2023

277 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 11 CONROE-NORTH HOUSTON REGIONAL AI RPORT the airport’s parking aprons and older taxiways. Learning to fly In many ways, Texas is synonymous with aviation. Brown says there are quite a few flight schools in the region. Among them is the American Flyers Flight Academy in Conroe. The academy also has two locations in Addison, some three hours northwest of Conroe. Other such schools include Flight Safety International, the Flying Tigers Flight School, the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Harco Aviation, LLC, Sterling Aviation Early College High School, Starflight Aviation, and United Flight Systems, Inc. All of them are located in Houston. Once their training is completed (in as little time as two months or as long as six years, depending on the program), flight-school graduates will almost immediately find paying gigs with airlines, as Brown points out. Talking of which, he also addressed the uniquely Brown lauded the Montgomery County Commissioners for their commitment to the airport and its infrastructural improvements. “Our county commissioners are taking a really good, forward-looking approach,” he says, continuing, “We’ve added a lot of capacity. We’ve extended our runway.” That 1,500-foot extension was completed by Webber, LLC (a firm specializing in heavy civil construction) in 2014, bringing the main runway’s length to 7,501 feet to accommodate larger aircraft and better serve Montgomery County residents, thus having quite a beneficial local economic impact. Also, a part of this project (which had a price tag of some $20 million) was the construction of a new taxiway on the airport’s west end. The project’s funding was made possible by the Airport Improvement Program from the Airport Improvement Administration, which provides grants to airports to facilitate their capital improvement projects. The Texas Transportation Commission approved the grant, and then the Texas Department of Transportation Aviation Division managed the grant and subsequent construction. Other improvements include the addition of parallel taxiways to increase runway capacity, as Brown points out. “We’ve done a lot of reconstructing of our runways and taxiways to increase our weight limit,” he adds, “and that all coincided with the growth and development of larger aircraft. Then, the icing on the cake was adding U.S. Customs.” Plus, there are many future projects. Citing just one example, right now, says Brown, efforts are underway to re-mark the runways. “We’ve got another project slated to reconstruct some older taxiways to bring those weight limits up, as well as a little bit of a higher standard,” he adds, also citing repaving some of