Work may begin later this year on a long-planned project to build a new taxiway at the Tucson International Airport.
Arizona’s second largest airport, behind the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, the Tucson airport is getting around $33.1 million in federal funds for the taxiway work, as well as the reconfiguration of an existing runway.
The funding is coming through the Federal Aviation Administration’s Runway Incursion Mitigation Program.
That program, launched in 2015, is tasked with increasing runway safety in the nation’s airports via infrastructure improvements. Crunching the numbers from runway incursions nationally during a six-year period, the program focused on the greatest risk factors in select airports leading to those incursions.
The program earlier determined that there were some 140 airfields with a high degree of runway incursions, all eligible for FAA funding support.
In announcing the funding for the Tucson airport projects, as well as other similar projects across the country, Shannetta Griffin, associate administration of the FAA, remarked: “Some airfields have complex layouts that can create confusion for pilots and other airport users.”
Griffin added that the just-announced funding will be used to “reconfigure complex taxiway and runway intersections to help prevent incursions and enhance the safety of the national airspace system.”
After a dip during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the Tucson Airport last year saw an increase in passenger volume from 2.5 million to just over 3.3 million travelers.
In the spring of 2022, the Tucson Airport received a federal grant of nearly $23 million for ongoing work on a $350 million airfield safety improvement project. That project comprises the largest such project of its kind in the history of the airport.
By Garry Boulard
