Roundabout Projects Accelerate as Mobile Airport Transfer Approaches
A roadway closed for the construction of a roundabout leading into Mobile’s new airport will reopen Monday, the Mobile Airport Authority board learned at a Wednesday meeting.
That news came amid signs that, as construction work on the airport itself enters its final stages, preparations for the transfer of commercial passenger service from west Mobile to the Brookley Aeroplex are snowballing rapidly.
That’s a major shift in focus. From the groundbreaking in late 2022 through early 2026, the authority’s focus was firmly on getting the new Mobile International Airport Terminal, a parking deck and other related facilities ready to open. Issues affecting the construction timeline and budget occupied the board’s attention.
By early 2026, the board was confident that the facilities would be substantially complete by September. But that highlighted other needs, such as neglected plans for two traffic circles leading into the new facilities.
By March, those had moved to the front burner. The first was a fairly simple proposition, connecting the airport entrance road to Perimeter Road. Some planning work had been done, and the funding was in the airport project budget.
Work began in June, with the closure of Perimeter Road projected to last until late October. Adam Hays, acting executive director of the authority, said Wednesday that Perimeter Road will reopen Monday, Aug. 24. Some cosmetic work will remain, he said, but the road will again be open to through traffic.
Hays also said that he thinks work on a second roundabout at the intersection of Broad Street and Michigan Avenue will come soon.
That is a more complex situation: the roads are larger, the intersection sits just off I-10, and Michigan Avenue is a major corridor for industrial traffic coming in and out of Brookley.
“I think that by the time we get done, if we’re not careful, Mobile may be the roundabout capital of South Alabama,” Hays told the board. “This is actually a very exciting project simply because we’re taking a failing intersection that is paramount to the success of the Brookley Aeroplex, and we’re going to turn it into something that’s much more of a thoroughfare to support the Brookley Aeroplex and the airport itself.”
MAA board chairman Sandy Stimpson said the funding plan for the new roundabout has not yet been finalized. He does not expect that to slow the start of work.
Along with roadwork, the importance of Operational Readiness, Activation and Transition (ORAT) work emerged as a major concern. The term stands for Operational Readiness, Activation and Transition. It covers a multitude of details that have to be resolved in order for a new airport to open smoothly: from nailing down final, fine-grained decisions about décor to training airport staff so that they’re ready to go to work in a new facility loaded with new equipment and technology.
As recently as June, the MAA board was grappling with the question of whom to hire as its Operational Readiness and Airport Transfer (ORAT) consultant. Negotiations with one firm had progressed as far as a general outline of terms, but some on the board had reservations about the scope of the deal. That created an opening for the board to begin discussions with another firm, Vasey Aviation Group, which had been working with the fast-growing airport in Gulf Shores.
The decision came in Vasey’s favor. At Wednesday’s meeting, founder Andrew Vasey talked about progress since his team stepped in and began taking stock of the tasks at hand two weeks ago.
“There’s sort of four high-level missions that were asked of us,” he said. “One is to kind of get caught up on how the construction is going to be finish up. The second is that transition from regional over to international. The third was to look at the operating costs in the new building relative to head count, different contracts and debt service. And then the last was air service development.”
The overall challenge is complex, but Vasey provided a couple of examples of how his team has already begun work to streamline the transfer of service from Mobile Regional Airport in west Mobile to Mobile International Airport at Brookley.
One involves a delay in millwork going into the new facility. Vasey said that the construction team’s plan had been to put in the millwork – which includes fixtures such as ticket counters – and then to install and connect the electronic equipment that will be networked throughout the building.
Getting the electronics installed and tested was expected to take 12 weeks, he said. With the millwork behind schedule, he said, that 12-week timeline could easily stretch into 2027. So the millwork was an obstacle blocking a “critical path” forward, he said.
“In my 41-year career, I can’t tell you how many ticket counter installs I’ve done,” Vasey said. “Hundreds, hundreds of them. And what we did is, we said let’s, let’s get this off a critical path, because we need to get to an opening day.”
His tentative solution would make sense to anyone who’s plugged in the Christmas lights to see if they work before actually stringing them up on the tree.
“If we have to, we’re all going down to Home Depot to buy a bunch of tables like you’re all sitting around and we’re going to put the power on the ground under the table and the data up on top,” he said. “And then when those millwork shells come in, it’s very straightforward work. Put the millwork shell in and then hook the power, hook the data. They’ll all have been tested, they’ll all have been certified and you take this 12-week thing off the board.”
Similarly, he said, there had been some discussion about the TSA moving its security equipment from the old airport to the new one. There was a possibility that the TSA might initially move only one X-ray machine across town to the new terminal, leaving the rest behind until the old airport was fully shut down.
“And if that machine went down that day while we were trying to open and everybody was there, the unfortunate story would become [that] there’s a line out the door because the one machine doesn’t work,” Vasey said. “That’s not a very solid way to do things.”
He told the board that “we’ve now got what, I believe, is an agreement with them that they’re going to bring new equipment into the new building. They’ll all be in place, it’ll all be certified. It will have multiple lanes and everything so that when we open up, everything will have been there.”
Reaction from the board was positive.
“I hope those out in the audience grasp the amount of work that’s been done in the last two weeks,” said Stimpson. “Andy and his teams have come in and integrated themselves with the contractors, architects, our team, and been trying to absorb all of the information so that they can plot this pathway forward. From my perspective, and I think from some of the other board members, y’ all have done a tremendous job at this point.”
“Andy and his team have done a phenomenal job coming in, learning everybody’s names, getting up to speed with regard to knowledge transfer, doing some recon, things like that,” said Hays. “I think they spent their first week doing that and now they are really action-driven, plan-driven, they’re getting things done.”
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