Before the word “coronavirus” began to be used in everyday conversation, an average of 600 people boarded passenger planes at Charleston’s Yeager Airport each day, and they had 16 departing flights from which to choose.

These days, fewer than 30 passengers a day, on average, board commercial flights at Yeager, according to airport director Nick Keller.

“We have had about a 95% decrease in passengers,” he said.

United Airlines, which a few months ago offered three daily departures to Chicago, “is moving to three flights per week,” Keller said, “while Delta and American have been averaging one to two flights per day.”

Despite the grim passenger numbers, the outlook for the Charleston airport has a number of bright spots.

A contract to design the first two buildings planned for Marshall University’s new aviation school is expected to be let out to bid by mid-May. Sometime this fall, construction could get underway on the aviation school’s 10,500-square-foot classroom building and 12,000-square-foot hangar on land adjacent to Yeager’s general aviation area.

“This is one of the most exciting adventures to take place for Marshall and the Charleston area in a long time,” said Marshall University President Jerome Gilbert, who took part in a teleconference meeting of the airport’s governing board Wednesday. “It’s going to be one of the best flight schools on the East Coast, if not the country.”

A lighted road and utility corridor already lead the way to the site of the aviation school, where the classroom building and hangar will be built for about $4.5 million. Gilbert said the university already is negotiating the purchase of the school’s first two aircraft.

Last month, Yeager applied for a $1.5 million grant to provide 80 percent of the cost of extending a sewer line to the MU site and constructing an aircraft parking apron next to the aviation school.

While Yeager officials pursue plans to extend the airport’s runway and safety-overrun area into a portion of neighboring Coonskin Park, the first phase of a $3.9 million rebuilding project for the existing runway is expected to get underway in early September. On Wednesday, the governing board voted to award a $3.9 million contract to West Virginia Paving to do that work.

Keller said Yeager eventually will recover from the decline in passenger numbers brought on by the explosion of COVID-19 cases, a common experience for airports across the nation.

“It will take a long time to get back to where we were,” he said.

In the meantime, a $4.8 million coronavirus relief grant from the Federal Aviation Administration, formally accepted by the airport board Wednesday, will cover employee pay, utility bills and other operating costs through late summer or early fall, according to Keller.

A small portion of that fund also will be used to pay a $4-per-hour salary increase through the end of April to airport employees whose work brings them in close contact with the public.

Reach Rick Steelhammer at [email protected], 304-348-5169 or follow

@rsteelhammer on Twitter.

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©2020 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.)

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