Kenai's airport expects to reopen its main runway around Sept. 21

After four months of landing planes on a taxiway, Kenai Municipal Airport expects to move flights back onto its rebuilt main runway around Sept. 21.

Since May, aircraft have been using a temporary runway squeezed onto the airport's main taxiway while crews tore up and replaced the aging main strip. That fix is nearly done. "It's very likely that we will reopen the runway sometime around the week of September 21st," Erik Jordt, an engineer with HDL Engineering Consultants, told the Kenai Airport Commission on Thursday. He put the work at 95 percent complete, with just the pavement grooving, striping and some electrical work left.

Pilots and air carriers have spent the summer adjusting to the temporary setup — altered markings and lighting, and limits on how they can approach the airport in poor visibility. Jordt said HDL will send a flyer to air carriers and general-aviation users in the coming week to warn them the switch back is coming: "sometime the 22nd, 23rd of September, we'll start using the main runway again."

There's one more hurdle: the FAA has to run a flight check to certify the new runway lights. Once flights shift back, Jordt said, the airport can use its instrument approaches again, though some poor-visibility rules may stay tighter until the parallel gravel runway returns to normal use.

The project drew a pointed question from Commissioner Paul Monega, who said an FAA specialist in Seattle had told him the whole instrument-approach headache could have been avoided. "If the taxiway had been designated as an alternate runway, and done all the measurements, we wouldn't have gone through all the stuff with the instrument approach procedure," Monega said. Jordt said he didn't have that answer but would find out — and added that he's curious what it would take to designate the taxiway as a permanent alternate runway. HDL returns in October with a final update.

Kenai's project is one of many around Alaska using federal aviation money to replace aging pavement, lighting and drainage while keeping airports open on temporary setups.