Joel Phan
• Special to the Leader & Times
EDITOR’S NOTE — This is a writing project by a local student working on a community project.
While the city’s attention lately has focused on the proposed repairs coming soon to Adventure Bay, Airport Manager Brian Fornwalt has been overseeing an airport with a hangar much older then Adventure Bay and in much greater need of either repair or removal.
The World War 2 Hangar just north of the Air Museum stands out as not only one of the largest structures on the entire airport but also as the most deteriorated. Unfortunately, action may be slow.
“The city is trying to figure out what to do with it,” Fornwalt said. “It’s just that we don’t know what yet.”
While the city may not know what they would like to do with the hangar, Fornwalt knew what he wanted. He wants to have the hangar taken down and replaced with a new one.
“It is kind of an eyesore,” he said. “It would be nice to take it down and put a new hangar there. That way we could have a new hangar for something that people could actually use, because it is way past something that is able to be usable.”
Fornwalt hoped that a new hangar would be just as large as the current one.
“That way if we do have a storm come through while SkyWest is here, we could get their plane down there and get it put in,” Fornwalt said.
Currently, none of the hangars on the airport are capable of holding an aircraft the size of the CRJ200s SkyWest operates out of Liberal. Fornwalt hoped that a new hangar would also increase airport capacity to store smaller aircraft.
“We are full with our T-hangars,” Fornwalt said. “We could get some planes in there, or if anybody’s coming in we could get them in just to make some revenue for the airport.”
Fornwalt is not the only person who holds the belief that fixing the hangar is more trouble than it is worth.
“We’ve already tried to find out about historical (value), and there is no historical (value) to it,” he said. “They looked into the state, and the state said ‘I think there is no historical value to it.’ I know that citywide, there would be historical value, but for the state, they said there is no historical value to it.”
However, Fornwalt said that the airport takes a lower priority on the city’s list, and with numerous projects fighting for the resources and time of airport workers, even if a decision is made on the hangar it would likely not be implemented for some time.
“We’re out here where nobody really drives out,” Fornwalt said. “With the water park being in the center of town and it gets more use, (the city) is always going to do that first, and we’re going to be put on the back burner, and I’m used to that. Right now we have a $6 million project that just started. It’s a parallel taxiway for our crosswind runway. We’re working on a parking lot project that’s going to be more than $2 million, plus after that a terminal project that’s going to be probably $13 to $16 million. Everything out here just costs a lot more than what the water park is going to be.”
Despite this fact, Fornwalt remained optimistic that progress can be made.
“We’ll just have to see what happens,” he said. “It all depends on the commission.”
While Fornwalt and many others have their own opinions on the hangar and what they would like to see be accomplished, an official, government plan remains to be implemented or even funded. So the hangar remains an empty husk of a building with no change in its future, at least for now.
