Airport runway in wrong place FAA 'oversight' to cost nearly $1 million to fix

A plane gets ready for takeoff at DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport Wednesday evening. Chronicle photo HOLLY LUNDH

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DeKALB - What city officials are calling an oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration has resulted in a $1 million error at DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport. The good news, they say, is that federal tax dollars are expected to cover nearly all the cost of correcting it. More than a year after the FAA approved the city's airport layout plan, city officials were told in March that there were problems with the location of a recently constructed taxiway as it relates to the proposed location of a piece of aircraft landing equipment. The equipment, called a glide slope, will be part of the airport's instrument landing system, or ILS. An ILS is designed to allow a plane to land during times of very low visibility, generally caused by poor weather. Taxiway B runs between where the glide slope is to be placed and the direction from which aircraft approach one of the airport's runways, meaning that it is possible that the presence of aircraft on the taxiway could interfere with the signal sent from the glide slope to planes coming in to land, Public Works Director Rick Monas said Tuesday. "The potential exists to interrupt that signal," he said. "It requires us to revise our airport layout plan overall." The FAA also had a concern that someone working on the glide slope equipment could be hit by "jet blast" from a plane on the taxiway. Because the glide slope must be placed in the location called for on the airport's originally approved plans if it is to work properly, the city is faced with relocating the taxiway, constructed about two years ago for $70,000. The cost of reconstructing taxiways to accommodate the glide slope and other associated costs total just under $1 million, Monas said. Chuck Hagloch of Springfield-based Hanson Professional Services Inc., the city's consultant on the airport for more than 20 years, said the FAA identified the problem after it had seen cases of glide slope signal interruption at airports elsewhere in the country. He and Monas said the agency made no mention of any problem with the glide slope location at the time it approved the airport's layout plan, which Monas said was in January 2004. City Manager Mark Biernacki said FAA officials have given the city assurances that federal funds will be tapped to pay for correcting nearly all of what he and other city officials do not want to term a "mistake" on the part of the FAA. "If you want to call it a mistake," Monas said. "Actually, it was an observation because of incidents that happened at other airports." FAA officials from the agency's Des Plaines regional office either were not available or were not able to provide comments on Wednesday. The cost to the city of fixing the problem will be only about $24,000, Monas said. But getting it corrected will delay the project. "If everything were to go without any problems ... we're expecting it Jan. 1 of 2007," Monas said about when the ILS could be completed and operational. The city hopes having the ILS will attract corporate and other larger, commercial aircraft, and the revenue they generate, to the airport. "It further modernizes the airport and makes it even more attractive for increased utilization," Biernacki said. Chris Rickert can be reached at crickert@pulitzer.net.