PROVO — After years of nail-biting moments at the Provo City Airport, an air traffic control staff will be hovering over departures and arrivals 98 hours a week from a tower officially opened on Monday.
Air traffic controllers actually began work from the tower June 27, but the ribbon on the 114-foot perch was cut during a July 4th flag-draped ceremony by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett and Rep. Chris Cannon, all R-Utah.
Construction took a year and was paid for entirely by $2.1 million in federal funding. City officials and the three elected Republicans from Utah lobbied for a tower for four years.
The air traffic controllers are staffed by a contractor, Serco Group of Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Associated with the tower are new rules for pilots. They must contact air traffic control within 4 1/2 miles of the airport — the controlled airspace — 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, airport manager Steve Gleason said.
During the times when the tower isn't staffed, pilots are to communicate the way they have since the airport opened in the 1940s — radio contact with each other.
The absence of air traffic controllers to monitor the airport's two runways has led to numerous, harried take-offs and landings.
Mayor Lewis Billings recalled an incident when two planes tried to miss each other but didn't quite. Residents from Richfield returned to the airport to fly home after having spent part of the day in Provo. The pilot noticed another plane in the area that was about to land but thought there was enough time to depart from the runway ahead of the arriving plane.
The plane never got off the ground because a second plane the pilot wasn't aware of was landing first.
A wing grazed the canopy, there was a fire but everyone survived, the mayor recalled.
"That would not have happened had this tower been open that Saturday," Billings said.
The Provo airport has between 147,000 and 160,000 departures and landings a year, Billings said.
Sixty-five to 70 percent of the times, the planes are occupied by students from Utah Valley State College's aviation program and a few private pilot schools. The other traffic is from small, noncommercial planes.
By comparison, the Ogden municipal airport has 98,000 departures and landings; Salt Lake City International Airport, 411,000.
E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com