Forest Service Plans to Use Drake Field

The National Forest Service has decided to move it’s air tanker base from Fort Smith to Fayetteville’s Drake Field.

Alett Little, Fayetteville’s economic director and airport manager, said hangar construction at the Fort Smith airport had made it difficult for the Forest Service to operate large aircraft there and prompted the decision to move the base.

The base will serve primarily Arkansas and Oklahoma, but aircraft could be dispatched from Fayetteville to fight forest fires anywhere in the United States, Little said.

The deal is contingent upon final lease and contract negotiations and approval by the Fayetteville airport board and city council. The base would employ between five and 15 people in addition to fire-fighting crews.

The base will consist of a small office building and 8.5 to 10 acres of land that will be used for an apron (aircraft parking). The land would be leased from the city for $2,200 per year per acre.

Construction of the facility is expected to begin in 2001 and be completed a year later. Little said it’s difficult to estimate the cost of the project, but said a “ballpark figure” would be $2 million to $2.5 million.

The acreage at the base would be home to four 10,000 gallon tanks of fire retardant and two large tanker aircraft (either C-130s or Lockheed P-3 Orions). The C-130 is a four-engine turboprop airplane designed during the Korean War as a military transport. The airplanes weigh 78 tons and are 99 feet long with a wingspan of 133 feet. Both the C-130 and P-3 have capacity for 3,000 gallons of fire retardant.

A press release from the Forest Service said the base would provide “fast-response, initial attack aerial fire fighting capabilities” for the Forest Service and other federal land managing agencies in Arkansas and bordering states.

The decision to build the tanker base at Drake Field was based on results from a four-month study of air tanker operations throughout the South. The decision was based on safety, community services available, air traffic control, operational concerns, additional construction costs and lease costs.

The Forest Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, currently has crews at airports in Fort Smith, Little Rock and Texarkana in addition to the Oklahoma cities of Lawton, Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

Drake Field was home to five commercial airlines before completion of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill in the fall of 1998. Since then, all five commercial airlines have left Drake Field for the new airport and city officials have explored options for the underused airport facility south of Fayetteville.