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Small planes take flight elsewhere

Jim McNally | .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | Oct. 27, 2007

Terry Wright knows a thing or two about airplanes.

He was raised in Dayton, Ohio - where a certain pair of siblings had a bicycle shop before moving part of their operation to Kitty Hawk - and his name is, well, Wright.

“They say we are related somehow,” Terry Wright said. He was alluding, of course, to brothers Orville and Wilbur, who invented those flying gadgets.

Wright, who now lives in Statesville, has been flying for about half the time airplanes have been in existence. He has been involved in the flying business since shortly after World War II and, among other endeavors, helped get Balloon Works off the ground.

But so-called fixed-wing aircraft have been his biggest passion.

Wright - who has had his pilot’s license since the late 1940s - owns a late 1960s model Cessna airplane. And though he lives less then a 10-minute drive from the Statesville Regional Airport, he parks his plane about 45 miles away in Iron Station.

The small town is the home of the Lincolnton-Lincoln County Regional Airport.

“In Lincoln County, they treat me as if they want me,” Wright said. “And that’s not the feeling I get from Statesville.”

The Lincoln County airport had a gathering on Tuesday in which airport and county leaders announced their receipt of a $320,000 state grant, which, along with matching funds from local governments, will go toward the construction of a new terminal there.

The new structure is a step toward the airport going after some of the bigger players in the big-money flying game.

“We don’t have a Lowe’s or a those NASCAR boys right now,” said Airport Manager Jeff Lynn. “But we are getting bigger, and I think we are going to get there some day.”

By “there,” Lynn means the place where Statesville’s airport already is.

Like every county and municipality within puddle-jumping distance of Charlotte, Lynn and the rest of Lincoln County have a strong sense of the behemoth as it expands in all directions.

“Oh, we are all well aware that Charlotte is coming up,” he said. “We see it, we hear about it and we feel it. We just have to make sure we are ready for it.”

Bill Williams is the aviation director for the N.C. Department of Transportation.

While most people think of the NCDOT as a governmental arm that fills in the potholes on the interstate highways and ensure traffic signals are where they should be, Williams has quite a more expansive view of what transportation is.

“We have great roads in North Carolina, there’s no question about that,” Williams said at Tuesday’s gathering in Lincoln County. “But my belief is that all good roads lead to a good airport.”

Williams said that private flying is essentially where private driving was a century ago.

“General aviation is and will be for the foreseeable future, where the boom is,” he said. “Flying represents the growth sector in transportation.”

David Lowe, who chairs Lincoln County’s airport authority, said all airports will have to keep up with the kind of proliferation Williams is talking about or lose out.

“Just replacing the terminal will not put us where we want to be in five years or 10 years,” Lowe said.

He said there is a waiting list 40 plane-owners deep in Lincoln County.

And all of them have more in common with people like Wright than with people like NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr., who parks his multi-million dollar Learjet 60 in Statesville.

And they are not so much attracted to airports like the one in Iron Station for where they are going, but rather for where they are right now.

While city and airport leaders in Statesville were in contract talks with corporations like Rubbermaid and Ginn Racing, Lincoln County was building smaller plane-housing facilities called T-hangars.

“We built 24 of them in the past year,” Lynn said. “We want the corporate guys, but we don’t want to forget about everyone else while we try to bring them in. We want to cater to both groups.”

Alan Brown, who flies a plane for a development company in the Lake Norman area, said he considered keeping his plane in Concord or Statesville but ultimately decided on Lincoln County.

“They are very friendly to small-plane owners here,” Brown said. “There is nothing wrong with going after the corporations with $10 million and $20 million aircraft, but the smaller guys need a place, too.”

Carla Reese is another small-plane owner who found a home in Iron Station.

“They are just so nice to us here,” said Reese, who owns a UPS Store franchise in Charlotte. She and her husband own a Beach Baron airplane.

“Our original plans were to keep it in Charlotte, but we came here and they treated us so good we never left,” she said. “This airport really wants the small planes.”

Wright agrees.

“Statesville hears about a company with an expensive plane and they go ga-ga about all the tax money that it could bring in,” he said. “But a lot of tax revenue can also come from having a lot of smaller planes.”

Statesville City Manager Rob Hites thinks the whole argument is a mute one.

“All airports are different,” he said. “This is a question of apples and oranges. No two airports or any other business operate the same or are looking at the same market.”

But Wright said that one area of apples-to-apples is the price of fuel for the airplanes.

And the numbers are clearer on this matter.

According to AirNav.com - a Web site that gathers information on airports and their services - at $4.99 per gallon, the price of 100LL jet fuel costs more in Statesville than at any of the other 19 airports within a 45-mile radius.

Lincoln County charges $4.26 a gallon for the same type of fuel.

And, as Wright pointed out, even small airplanes typically have gas tanks that hold 200 gallons or more.

“So 50 or 75 cents per gallon can add up very fast,” Wright said.

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