Lights out on Fort Smith airport runway diverts flight

John Parker was operating Tuesday (Dec. 29) on very little sleep.

Monday evening when the runway lights at the Fort Smith Regional Airport were turned on, only the western half of the 8,000-foot runway was illuminated. Parker, airport director, and five other airport staff began the search for what went wrong. It turns out the lights around the runway are, like the old Christmas tree string lights, on a series circuit. If one the circuit is interrupted at any point, all the lights are out.

“It’s not unusual (for lights to go out), but most of the time it’s in the taxiway,” Parker said.

Parker added that usually its easy to find the source the problem. Monday night was not one of those easy finds. In all, eight airport staff worked long shifts and were able to get the runway lights fixed by morning, with Parker able to leave the airport by 7 a.m.

“We were aggressively tackling the problem, trying to get it addressed,” he explained.

The outage caused only one commercial plane to divert — an American Eagle flight, which flew to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA). A Delta flight landed and general aviation aircraft continued to use the field, Parker said.

“It was a company decision to divert,” Parker said of the American Eagle flight.

Parker said rehab plan of the airport’s electrical system was made about a year ago. To rehab the entire system would cost about $4 million, he said. Because the airport does not have the funds to rehab the entire system at once, the work is being included in the various runway and taxiway improvements underway and planned.

For the first 11 months of 2009, enplanements total 72,545, down 9.6% from the 80,287 enplanements in the same period of 2008. Passenger enplanements at the Fort Smith Regional Airport totaled 87,030 in 2008, down 12.2% from the 99,127 enplanements in 2007. The 2008 traffic total is the lowest at the airport in the past 10 years.