Service to Chicago, Lower ILS Requirements Enhance Fayetteville’s Drake Field Service

American Eagle wants to begin offering non-stop flights to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport from Fayetteville, but approval is still needed from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Simmons Airlines is parent company for American Eagle, the American Airlines commuter service flying into Fayetteville’s Drake Field. Simmons, which has applied for some newly available slots at O’Hare, wants to offer non-stop service to Chicago from Fayetteville and several other cities, including Shreveport, La., Springfield, Mo., and Charleston, W.Va. Currently, American Eagle has 26 daily arrivals and departures from Fayetteville.

Dale Frederick, airport manager at Drake says the additional service would enhance service to passengers, many of whom currently fly to Dallas and then back over Arkansas to reach Chicago. The proposed plan would give Fayetteville three daily departures and three arrivals from Chicago. The airline planes to use 50-passenger Embraer 145 regional jets.

Additional service to O’Hare had been halted because of congested conditions at the nation’s busiest airport, but the suspension of certain military operations there made available the gates for which American Eagle is applying, Frederick says.

The Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority has endorsed the application. The authority is overseeing construction of a new airport that’s expected to compete with Drake for passengers when it opens. But, in a letter to the Secretary of Transportation, authority chairman Stan Green cites the region’s tremendous growth in urging approval of the application.

In other news Drake, the Federal Aviation Administration has agreed to lower visibility requirements for use of the instrument landing system. Once the new regulations are in place — and officials hope that will be within three weeks — pilots will be allowed to fly as low as 312 feet when visibility is at least one mile before determining whether to land or to fly over. Previously, the limits were 500 feet when visibility was 1 1/2 miles, Frederick says.

tttttttttt—Patricia May