How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Airport (Part II)

In Part I, we looked at the why and wherefore of these historic changes and explored the modification of the south end of the runway. Today, we will look at the new vision being realized for the north end.

North end when all was well.

Having recently relocated to the north end, this change is of at least equal import as the south end, if not a little more. Certainly during the tear out it will be of significantly greater import, and have a greater impact, but more on that later.

Just a closer look at the before.

Faintly visible between the hold short line and Taxiway A is the yellow dashed box used for runups. There is a good bit of space and room for multiple airplanes to runup and wait to take off, or cross the runway to Taxiway B. You can also see that Taxiway A4 intersects the runway at more of a 45 degree angle than a 90 degree one. Since I am in one of the hangars at the middle right of the frame, using 16 is very convenient for me, except in the winter when I don't have enough taxi time for the oil to warm up before I get to the runway. Again, the current arrangement works quite well.

The 16 (north) end final plan.

As you can see from the above image, once again there will be a lot of asphalt dug up and disposed of.

A zoomed in view of the final plan.

Ignore the poorly drawn red box above. I thought that was what they intended the runup area to be, but you can see dashed yellow lines to the right of the red box that mark the actual runup area. That is not as bad as I feared, there is probably room for two airplanes in there. People will end up using any bit of pavement they can find and may do their runups much closer to the hangars there than they currently do.

While the end product is bad enough, the construction phase is even worse. For at least a month and a half, the north end will be effectively cut off from the rest of the airport with no access to runways at all.

16 project impacts.

Of particular interest to me in this figure is the yellow (or orange, or whatever color it looks like to you) section at the upper left of the diagram. As a resident of that area I was quite concerned. Their solution is a temporary taxiway going through the grass to the north of the construction area and tying back into runway 16 so that a person can cross it and reach Taxiway B. I didn't think that looked like a good plan on paper and it looks even worse in real life.

Temporary gravel taxiway.

This is the temporary "construction" taxiway that they are installing. It looks bad enough from a distance, but up close it looks, well, worse.

It is rougher than it looks.

After seeing this I was even further convinced that there is no way that I would taxi through that. If I had a Super Duper Cub, or a Sportsman, or, better yet, an RV-15, I probably wouldn't object to an off road excursion, but in an RV-8, no thanks. In fairness, Carl pointed out that they may not be finished and the final product may not be so bad. I suppose that is true, but I'm not counting on it.

In fact, they did roll the gravel and it turned out to be better than the photo above, but not much. I still didn't want to have to taxi across that.

In part one I made reference to moving out of an old hangar. I used to have a hangar at the south end just south of the main ramp. In a panic when I saw the notice above, I contacted the lease agent and asked if I could stay in that hangar until the work was complete, about the end of August. I was concerned that it had already been rented and I would be out of luck, but I got lucky and it was still available and I was told that it would be no problem to stay there for another two months. That will be a little inconvenient since I literally have taken everything out of that hangar and now have to bring a little bit back, but it is extremely better than the alternative.

North end demolition, officially titled phase 3A and 3B, began on July 8th.

7/12/25 after 4 days of work.

Once again I was a bit surprised to see how deep they dug.

They seemed to have the north end work a little more segmented and I could have stayed int he north hangar for another week or two longer than I did since they didn't completely close the taxiway for the initial work. Still, it wasn't worth the risk and was best to be out of the way.

7/20/25 after 9 days of work.

The initial demolition seemed to move pretty quickly, but after the first 10 days or so, it seemed like there was much less change week to week. By 8/9/25 they had the tear out done and were starting to lay and grade the gravel in preparation for paving.

8/9/25 after 24 days of work.

Phase 3B began on 8/13/25. The big difference here is that any of the workarounds provided earlier are going to be closed during the final phase also. In the words of the notice given "All temporary routes will be closed during phase 3B." Fortunately I had already taken measures to mitigate this, but last weekend I saw John tying his airplane down on the main ramp for the duration.

By 8/16/25 they had most of the prep work done, including mounting most of the taxiway lights, and had even laid the first layer of asphalt.

8/16/25 after 29 days of work.

Most of the new Taxiway A4 has the first layer of asphalt.

The sign post up ahead, you are now entering the Ultralight zone.

One thing that I am happy to see is the sign shown above. I don't think there was anything similar before, at least not containing the middle line. There are frequent unspoken (an sometimes spoken, on the radio) arguments about what runway to use. The people at the north end like to use 16, naturally since it is a shorter taxi, and the people at the south end prefer to use 34 for the same reason. As a recovering south-ender, I understand the desire to use 16. Having been in a north end hangar for a while, I also get not wanting to taxi all the way to the other end.

The problem is, there have been people using both at the same time, I know because it has happened to me twice. That is not a good thing. There has to be a standard and until 10 or so years ago there was nothing published about Arlington showing 34 as the preferred calm wind runway, with "calm wind" being defined as 5 knots or less. It helps having a standard, but unfortunately many pilots don't read signs any better than most drivers do.

There were two days recently that we got rain. The first was the 7th, but that didn't really effect the work that was being done. The second was on the 15th and that would have affected the work being performed, but that was scheduled as a non-work day already. The people doing the work say that they expect to be finished on time, perhaps a day early. The scheduled completion date is 8/21/25. If it is done that day or Friday, the next day, I can put the airplane away next weekend and then get to sweep out the old hangar again. Yay.

Final paving began in earnest on Tuesday 8/19/25.

Photo courtesy of Carl N.

By Thursday 8/21/25, the day that the project was scheduled to be finished, they were painting the lines and blowing in the grass seed stuff. I stopped by at 4:30 on my way home form work and all of the barricades had been removed, and all of the vehicles were gone.

Project complete 8/21/25.

To end this story as I began, I am not at all happy with what they have done to this great little (well, OK medium sized) airport. I understand the goal that had to be reached but feel that it could have been achieved with much less negative impact to the airport users. Perhaps having a pilot or two involved in the planning process, the actual drawing up of the plans, process would have netted a better outcome.

While I am not happy with the outcome, I am very happy that it is finally over. It took the better part of four months, but it is finished.

All of the photos are available here.