A weather station may finally be up and running at Plymouth Municipal Airport in the near future. Airport Manager Dave Lattimer told the Plymouth Common Council Monday the AWOS III weather station is in place on the south side of the runway and the related computer equipment has been delivered.
He said a technician was scheduled to hook everything up Tuesday. “There’s a 30-day testing [period] involved with it, and it needs to be accepted by the FAA and the U.S. weather service,” Lattimer explained. “It needs to operate 30 days problem-free. In all likelihood, it’s going to be over 30 days to get the bugs out of the system, but it’s that far from being completed after six-and-a-half years of struggle to get us a weather station for the City of Plymouth.”
The weather station was one of a few projects highlighted during Lattimer’s update Monday. He said the installation of a solar project has also been completed in recent weeks. “The airport’s involvement is simply to lease one-and-a-half acres of property to a company that invested a whole bunch of money to construct a solar station,” he said. “It’s in the testing phase now, and we’ll be online full-time here in a few weeks. The airport gained six times the value of leasing that same acre-and-a-half to our local farmer that farms that field over a 15-year period. So it’s a good thing for the airport.” Lattimer adds that work on the north-south taxiways is set to wrap up in April.
During Monday’s meeting, he also presented the airport’s updated five-year plan. He says the runway extension is being put off for the future. Instead, airport officials have decided to focus their efforts on additional hangar space. “The last six years, we had a wait list for people wanting hangar space,” Lattimer said. “We currently have four names on that wait list. It’s been up to eight. We could add eight hangars and within 30 days, I’m confident it would be full. So the aviation board looked at that.”
Plans also call for the relocation of the main driveway about 200 feet to the north to get it out of the runway’s protected area. Lattimer says clearing the protected area may lead to increased funding from the Federal Aviation Administration for various projects.
