photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Lawrence's Aviation Advisory Board hosted an open house meeting about the process of updating the Lawrence Regional Airport master plan Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024.

What will Lawrence Regional Airport look like in five, 10 or even 20 years? An updated master plan for the airport is now in the works, and it could provide a blueprint for the future once it’s complete.

Lawrence’s Aviation Advisory Board hosted an open house for the master plan update Wednesday at the airport terminal, where city staff and representatives with Garver — the engineering and planning firm the city has contracted with to complete the plan — were on hand to gather feedback about existing and future needs at the airport.

For Clancey Maloney, the board’s chair, the answer is simple: modernization. Maloney told the Journal-World it’s time for Lawrence to see where it fits in among the crowd of other area airfields, from Topeka Regional Airport to Kansas City International

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“We need to bring this airport into the 21st century,” Maloney told the Journal-World. “… We need to see how we fit in with that. On game days, we’ll have this whole ramp filled up with business jets. You ought to come out sometime just to see it — it’s worth it. The potential is huge if we can just get it developed, and this is the start.”

John Rostas, a senior aviation planner with Garver, told the Journal-World the master plan will provide a 20-year infrastructure development plan for the airport, based on feedback from stakeholders like Maloney. Materials from Garver provided to the Journal-World also note that developing the plan will require taking an inventory of baseline airport facility conditions, forecasting passenger and aircraft activity and developing a graphical depiction of the preferred airport layout.

It’s a federal requirement, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, to update an airport’s master plan once every 10 years or so. Without compliance to that standard, an airport can lose its eligibility for federal funding.

Rostas said the last master plan update for Lawrence Regional Airport was in 2012, and since then there have been numerous changes in FAA design standards. Once complete, the document will also outline what Lawrence needs to do to meet those standards to the fullest extent possible.

But it’s still only the start of that process, which Rostas estimated could take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to complete. Rostas said for now, that means the project team is focusing on identifying exactly which issues are of importance to the city and community relative to the airport. He said there will be other public engagement opportunities like Wednesday’s open house to facilitate that moving forward.

“The process that we are following is a federally prescribed process, in terms of the overall administration of the project,” Rostas said. “The timeline itself is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen for airports that are of similar scale nationwide.”

What the plan won’t do is set out any direction for business or strategic growth, obligate the city to meet any future funding needs or even guarantee development will occur in the future.

But that’s by design — Rostas said the plan is intended to be more conceptual in nature, flexible enough that it can support any long-term changes without limitations.

“I think something that we would want people to understand is that this is just step one of many in an overall developmental process, and the community would be engaged throughout that entire process,” Rostas said.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for dreaming. Twenty years down the road, Maloney said she’d like to see a Lawrence Regional Airport that supports more aviation-related businesses, and with more aircraft that use it as a base.

“This airport is absolutely an economic driver for the city,” Maloney said. “There was a study done about seven years ago that showed that there was about a $20 million impact then, and that was before Eurotec Vertical Flight Solutions got here. So we’re looking at a potential of another $10 million worth of economic impact here, and I’d like to see that happen.”