Aviation View | Volume 2, Issue 2

84 AVIATION VIEW VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2 side and remove a hump that had developed in the middle. We also replaced all of our lighting systems with LED, which is nice because now we can afford to pay the electric bill every month.” When looking ahead, McMillen feels the most obvious and advantageous change would be to have a 7500-foot runway. In the meantime, the focus has to be on how to bring in additional revenue now. He shares, “My mantra is always: If it’s safe and it looks to be what’s best for the city, we’ll try it. One of the things we’ve made some decent headway on is freight operations. We were doing some recently – before COVID we probably had three planes in here every Thursday night and if you look at charging forklift fees, handling fees, and an overtime fee and then selling them fuel, we were making $1,000 a turn per airplane. We need to work on expanding that part of our operation. I also want to see us help our flight schools to get off the ground, no pun intended, and that we continue to work to keep an interest in aviation alive in the public. Before COVID, we had air shows and, hopefully, those will come back. The Civil Air Patrol does their orientation right here and in the last couple of weeks, they have flown a huge number of kids. There is so much potential, and we want to capitalize on that.” PREFERRED VENDOR/PARTNER n Anderson Madison County Visitors Bureau visitandersonmadisoncounty.com | info@visitamcvb.com