Aviation View - Oct 2023

64 AVIATION VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 Over the past five years, we have received a little over $20 million in federal and state grants to carry out upgrades to the airfield, the runway structure, taxiway structure, the terminal and to prepare for regional jet service that we are hoping to capture fairly soon,” he continues. “The general aviation part of our business has grown quite substantially over the last five years,” Lewis reflects. “ If we look at the years before COVID to now, we have increased our operations substantially and over the years we have broken new records. “A lot of this can be directly attributed to the business activity at the airport.” Lewis is quick to highlight the scope of this commercial activity. A multi-aircraft flight training business that operates daily on the airfield, in addition to two air ambulance companies, including Guardian Flight, and a direct medevac flight route to the neighboring San Juan Regional Hospital which takes the form of many night flights in and out of the airport. The airport also sees a healthy number of daily general aviation flights touch down and take off daily from Four Corners Regional Airport, Lewis details. “We are in a good spot geographically as a field stop for different business flights that are either moving east and west or north and south.” “We are also favored by some of the local military operations to do training. We have an air traffic control tower which they prefer. With a number of different instrument approaches that we have, it allows them to practice all kinds of different approaches to the runways that we have.” As for the airport’s FBO, Lewis has nothing but complimentary words to relay about them. “Atlantic Aviation is a real first-class FBO on the field that provides full service to all those various types of transient aircraft.” An enviable gateway to the outdoor splendor in Denver that was eventually purchased by Mesa Air Group, now based in Phoenix, but at that time was based here in Farmington. I started mainly in ground operations.” Working his way up with laser-focus, Lewis became the President of Mountain West Airlines, at the time, the largest division at Mesa Air Group. From there, Lewis’s career continued to take flight, bringing us to his current and enviable position overseeing the operations of the fourth busiest airport in the state of New Mexico, Four Corners Regional Airport. Operational dimensions of all ‘four corners of the airport When asked how he would describe the operational capabilities of Four Corner Regional Airport, Lewis is quick to answer. “We are a regional airport,” he begins. “ We currently don’t have commercial service and are actively seeking to reestablish commercial service.