Oct. 2—MANKATO — The planned location for the Mankato Regional Airport's first air traffic control tower has been selected — a spot close to existing roads, parking and utilities.
"That's our preferred site," Public Works Director Jeff Johnson told the City Council during a recent tour, pointing at the small collection of trees just north of the terminal parking lot.
Johnson said earlier this year the total cost of bringing a control tower to the airport could reach $20 million or more but will improve aviation safety at the increasingly busy airfield. With the location set, design work and more precise construction cost estimates can be developed.
Area residents are invited to learn more about the tower at an open house at the airport on Thursday. The event will show visitors the planned location, some of the environmental considerations involved and a sense of what the lofty structure might look like based on those being planned at airports in Duluth and Des Moines, said Shawn Schloesser, associate director for transportation planning services for the city.
As a come-and-go open house, there will be no formal presentation. So people can show up anytime between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. Thursday to learn about the project, other recently completed airport improvements and future upgrades under consideration.
"For those who are just curious, for those with an aviation background, for those who live in the surrounding area as well," Schloesser said, describing the target audience for the latest airport improvement open house. "... We usually have around 70 people show up."
Five possible sites for the tower were still under consideration at the start of this year. Two of the options were at locations nearer the runways, which provided good sightlines of aircraft operations even with a shorter control tower. But those spots were more remote from the airport's terminal, requiring costly extensions of access roads and water and sewer service, along with construction of a parking lot for air traffic controllers.
The spots closer to the terminal offered readily available infrastructure but required a much taller tower to provide sightlines over the terminal and other buildings so controllers will be able to see runways and taxiways. The final selection followed a lengthy process that even involved virtual reality imaging that represented what air traffic controllers would see as they turned their heads from the elevated control room atop each of the potential tower locations.
The completion of an environmental review will be followed by design and engineering work with construction starting as soon as 2025. The tower needs to be ready to operate by April of 2027, when it must pass an operational readiness evaluation by the Federal Aviation Administration, Schloesser said.
The FAA is expected to cover 90% of the cost of planning and constructing the tower and 100% of the payroll costs of the future air traffic controllers who will staff it. State transportation funding could reduce Mankato's share to as little as 5% of the facility development costs.
With the funding help comes a lot of regulatory complexity. It was more than five years ago that the City Council first discussed the possibility of seeking a control tower after the number of annual "operations" at the airport had reached 126,000 — many of them involving touch-and-go landings and other training done by Minnesota State University's popular aviation program.
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