April 23--The Morgantown Municipal Airport is often the starting point for WVU-related business trips, a university spokesman said.
But when WVU hires a charter plane for its sports teams, that company decides where passengers can board.
Administration, deans, faculty, students or other staff will catch WVU's leased plane in Morgantown for trips to Charleston or Washington, D.C., WVU s p o ke s m a n John Bolt said in an email. Use of the leased plane is highly restricted and monitored.
The charter planes that carry WVU athletic teams often take off from the North Central West Virginia Airport in Bridgeport or the Pittsburgh International Airport.
"It is the decision of the charter company to fly from there," Bolt said.
The Dominion Post
attempted to call Delta Air Lines -- the company used by WVU -- to see why a charter service would pick one airport over another for takeoffs and landings, but was unsuccessful.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesman Jim Peters said its up to the aircraft carrier and crew to decide if they can fly in and out of a particular airport safely.
Last year, there were more WVU-related trips from Morgantown than there were from Clarksburg, according to university figures.
Bolt said WVU's leased plane made 127 individual flights during the 2010-'11 fiscal year, almost all of which originated in Morgantown.
University employees also sometimes take commercial flights from the airport, he said, but he had no figures for those.
During the same year, 20 charter flights -- all involving sports teams -- took off from the Clarksburg airport.
The university has also contributed to plane-count at the Morgantown airport in other ways.
The Dominion Post previously reported about 250 Louisiana State University (LSU) fans arrived in Morgantown in private planes for the WVU home football game against the school in September.
Airport Director Michael Clow said about 35 private planes "were parked here all over the place" during the game. Also, about 10 private planes stayed long enough to drop people off before the game, he said.
Clow said he didn't keep track of passengers on commercial flights for that specific weekend -- those counts typically cover a month at a time. He added that he didn't notice any sort of spike in September's numbers.
Rick Rock, interim director of the North Central West Virginia Airport, did not respond to The Dominion Post in time for this report.
Copyright 2012 - The Dominion Post, Morgantown, W.Va.
