‘Stay engaged’; RDU breaks ground on new runway but says it still needs money for it
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RDU International Airport’s Plans to Grow
RDU plans $3 billion worth of construction projects over the coming decade to try to keep up with the region’s growth. Much of the work is laid out in a 25-year master plan called Vision 2040 that the airport adopted in 2016. The projects will turn the airport, with its record number of passengers, into a construction zone in the coming years. Here is ongoing coverage from The News & Observer.
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More than 200 politicians and business and community leaders were invited onto the airfield at Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Wednesday morning to celebrate federal approval to begin building a new main runway.
But along with speeches and the symbolic shoveling of dirt came a message, delivered mostly in one-on-one conversations: RDU still needs your help in securing money from the Federal Aviation Administration to finish the runway.
“That’s the purpose of this event,” Michael Landguth, airport president and CEO, said in an interview. “All of our board members are engaging all of these people, to have a conversation that says, ‘We have a victory, we have a decision, but the FAA has not committed to a long-term funding plan.’ .... So that’s got to be an ongoing campaign.”
The new runway, 5L/23R, will be built northwest of and parallel to the existing one near Terminal 2, the larger and busier of the two passenger terminals. After the new runway opens later this decade, the existing one will be converted into a taxiway.
RDU estimates the new runway and taxiway will together cost $534 million. That money is expected to come from a variety of sources, including the state and federal governments and RDU’s own revenues from parking, landing fees and other income.
But RDU doesn’t have all of it in hand, and a theme of Wednesday’s groundbreaking event was to stay engaged and help keep the pressure on federal officials to provide more.
Landguth said the Triangle business community has been particularly helpful with a letter-writing campaign to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
“Every single time I go to D.C., they tell me the same thing: Can you get them to stop sending letters?” Landguth told the crowd. “And I tell them the same thing every time: At the point you can provide us consistent funding for this runway, we’ll stop sending the letters.”
The letter-writing campaign will continue, said Joe Milazzo, executive director of the Regional Transportation Alliance, a program of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce.
“We’re going to be nice and continue to politely do it, because the need is still there,” Milazzo said after Wednesday’s event.
So far, the FAA has committed just $15 million to the runway project. The big infrastructure bill Congress passed in late 2021 will provide another $75 million. The RDU Airport Authority will also use its share of the state Airport Improvement Program, which comes to about $24 million a year.
$30 million in emergency repairs so far
The new 5L/23R will replace RDU’s existing main runway, which was completed in 1986 and is near the end of its useful life. The airport informed the FAA in 2017 that it needed replacing.
To keep it viable in the meantime, the airport has replaced 275 slabs of crumbling concrete, one at a time. The carefully choreographed process takes place overnight, when the airport is closed, providing just enough time for the new concrete to cure before the long-haul flights from Europe, which need the 10,000-foot runway, land in the afternoon.
Those repairs have cost RDU $30 million so far, Landguth said.
“And we are going to have to continue to do that for the next five to seven years until we can get this new runway constructed,” he said.
The new runway will stretch 10,639 feet, or 639 feet longer than the existing one. The additional length will allow all cargo and passenger carriers now doing business at the airport to operate their planes fully loaded.
The runway is one part of a larger construction plan at RDU that will include new parking, additions to both passenger terminals and new ground transportation and rental car centers in and adjacent to the parking decks. Altogether, RDU expects to spend $2.8 billion on construction in the coming decade.
All of this work was conceived before the COVID-19 pandemic. Planning was paused when the pandemic caused demand for air travel to plummet in 2020.
But people are flying again. July was the busiest month in the airport’s history, with nearly 1.4 million passengers, and the Friday before Labor Day set a new single-day record. RDU is on track to exceed its previous annual record of about 14 million passengers set in 2019.
Airlines have responded. Since February, they’ve added 46 routes, including 21 to new destinations. By next summer, Triangle passengers will be able to fly nonstop to four countries in Europe: France, Germany, Iceland and the United Kingdom.
This story was originally published October 11, 2023 at 2:23 PM.
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