South Georgia airports to receive federal grants for upgrades

TIFTON, Ga. – The Henry Tift Myers Airport in Tifton and the Turner County Airport in Ashburn are among 31 regional airports in Georgia receiving federal grants for upgrades.

The Tifton airport is getting $282,000, and the Ashburn airport will receive $56,500, Georgia’s U.S. Sens. John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock announced recently.

The grants are among more than $13 million in federal funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law to upgrade and help maintain Georgia’s regional airports.

“This investment in Georgia’s aviation infrastructure is critical to our state and its economy,” Warnock said.

“Georgia’s airports are a key driver of job creation and economic competitiveness,” Ossoff noted.

The Moultrie Municipal Airport is slated to receive $282,000; the Valdosta Regional Airport, which offers commercial flights, will receive $3,933,289 in federal funding.

Last year, the Tifton airport was awarded a $443,241 federal grant for hangar construction. Henry Tift Myers Airport has seen numerous improvements in recent years, including aerial mapping and GPS approaches on all of the runways, upgrades in the instrument landing system, and improvements to the weather reporting system so that pilots arriving from other states can get real-time weather conditions at the Tifton airport.

Two runway extension projects in the past several years increased the runway in Tifton – first from 4,800 to 5,500 feet, and then another 1,000-foot extension to 6,500 feet, which is just about as long as Albany’s airport.

Early last year the Tifton airport completed a $6 million project to overlay the entire main runway.

By FRANK SAYLES JR.

Tifton Grapevine

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