Santa Maria Airport hosts master plan workshop

It was an opportunity to see what the Santa Maria Public Airport could like like over the next 20 years.

“A lot of possibilities based on growth and potential growth”, said private pilot Mitch Latting who attended the public workshop and open house Tuesday night culminating work over the past year to update the airport’s Master Plan.

“We have gone through a process of taking an inventory of the airport and determining what some of our needs for the future may be”, said Airport General Manager Chris Hastert, “tonight we’re going over what some of those alternatives could look like, its basically designed to generate some discussion and get some comments back so then we can come up with a good draft of what we really want to see for the future.”

Not much change is in store for the main terminal or the airport runway over the next 20 years, most of the Master Plan update deals with future needs for commercial and general aviation.

“Our terminal building is well-suited to meet our future needs and the runway is well-suited to meet our future needs”, Hastert said, “you won’t see a big terminal building project but you will see smaller projects to better enhance the safety of the airport.”

As the Airport District Board and Airport management continued to try and add commercial flights in and out of Santa Maria, general aviation continues to be the main activity at the airport now and in the future.

“This is basically a general aviation airport with commercial service”, added Mitch Latting whose been flying his own plane out of Santa Maria airport since 1986, “there are very few commercial flights per day, per week, per month, per year, there’s more general aviation flights, we want to see both flourish.”