SPANISH FORK, Utah — Planes won’t be the only thing looming large over Spanish Fork Airport. The city recently signed off on an agreement with the FAA to bring an air traffic control tower to the facility in the years ahead.
The new tower comes as managers and pilots have seen the number of users take off in recent years.
“We are the busiest general aviation airport in the state,” said Spanish Fork Airport Manager Christian Davis. “If you just look at the pure operational numbers, Spanish Fork does 125,000 operations.”
The operations Davis mentioned are the number of take-offs or landings charted at the airport each year. In a single day, he said that number could be 600 or more, while also noting that the airport is the third-busiest in Utah, behind only Provo and Salt Lake City.
As airports to the north have seen commercial activity ramp up, Davis shared how many general aviators have taken to his strip of runway in southern Utah County.
Bound for Bryce Canyon on Saturday, local pilot Craig Judd saw that backup first-hand.
“There were four airplanes waiting to take off; I was fifth,” said Judd. “By the time I got up there to take off, there were six more behind me.”
Judd grew up in Spanish Fork, as his father also had a hangar. He remembers whole days when only five planes would go in and out.
Without an air traffic control tower, pilots out of Spanish Fork say they compare that modern congestion to how drivers would handle a four-way stop.
“You’ve got to rely on signal cues and everybody following the correct procedure for stopping and moving through that intersection,” Davis explained.
The airport has been pushing for years to get into the highly competitive FAA Federal Contract Tower program, and last week, the city council signed off on the agreement.
“Within the next three to six months, we’ll have FAA officials come to Spanish Fork Airport and they’ve got their own process of figuring out where on the airport property that the tower will be sited,” said Davis.
With all of the traffic, it’s an important step in addressing the airport's capacity and safety issues. Some pilots said it can’t come soon enough. But the process of designing, engineering, funding and finally constructing the project could take as long as five years.
“If it could be done any sooner than five years, that’d be great,” Judd said. “I just don’t want accidents in the meantime.”
