Taxiway could be path for Laconia Airport growth

LACONIA — Airport Manager Marv Everson and Federal Aviation Administration Deputy Regional Administrator Ken Knopp stood in 15-degree weather and looked at an old crosswind runway and a new taxiway.

The runway hasn’t been used in years, but a 2,230-foot extension of Taxiway Echo could be a pathway to growth for the general aviation airport.

Multiple airplane hangars could be built along the taxiway.

“We hope so,” Everson said last Thursday, minutes after a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the taxiway. “We have people reaching out, saying they want to, they’re interested.”

The $3 million taxiway project, largely funded by the FAA, includes drainage improvements and a 5,904-square-yard expansion of an aircraft parking apron, yielding 17 new aircraft parking positions.

Inside the warm and tidy terminal building, Laconia Airport Authority Chairman Ed Engler said the airport has done well financially, which has allowed for improvements.

“I’m enormously proud of what the airport has been able to accomplish over the last five or six years,” Engler said as an Embraer Phenom 300 executive jet taxied to a stop outside. A plane with a tuboprop engine was parked nearby.

“In recent years we’ve been able to put a lot of money back into improvements to the terminal, facilities and amenities that are not covered by Federal Aviation Administration grants.

“From what I can tell from talking to pilots — we have a lot of pilots involved in our authority — this airport terminal that you’re sitting in and related amenities is really the gold standard now in the state of New Hampshire for general aviation airports,” Engler said.

He said the airport has $1 million in cash reserves to make further improvements. The airport takes in about $350,000 a year on its operations.

Engler said the city-owned airport’s primary source of revenue is land lease payments from people who build hangars at the airport.

“One of the things this project is doing for us here is opening up this whole section — about five or six acres — where the old runway was, for future lot development,” he said, pointing to an aerial photo of the airport.

“That’s our next project for the airport. That’s going to allow us to increase the income coming in on an operating basis for the airport every year and make us even more solvent.”

The project was paid for with $150,000 from the airport, $150,000 from the state, and the rest from the FAA.

Emerson Aviation and Sky Bright are Laconia Municipal Airport’s fixed-base operators, providing various aviation-related services.

Air traffic has been increasing. It is heaviest during the summer tourist season, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, but there has also been growing traffic associated with private schools in the region — New Hampton School, Brewster Academy, Tilton School, and Holderness School — as some parents use private jets to ferry their children to and from school, as well as to visit them during the year.

Some of the acts that play at nearby Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion fly in to the airport, which is also busy when there are other major events in the Lakes Region, including at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon.