St. Cloud Regional Airport Soaring High with New Upgrades

(KNSI) — The excitement level at the St. Cloud Regional Airport was soaring Thursday as it celebrated landing a new tee hangar and firetruck.

Tee hangars are built in a row but have separate spaces for each plane.

The $3 million building is the first new hangar in 20 years and will house ten planes. Airport Director Bill Towle spoke with KNSI News immediately after the ribbon cutting. “Now we’ll have 110 airplanes on this airport, flying around, buying gas, being maintained, those kind of things. It’s going to be great for the economy.”

He says the hangars are the “bread and butter of aviation.” The ones using them are “the folks that either are flying around their small airplane for business or might be using their airplane to learn to fly and ultimately become pilots.”

The airport has a waiting list of 20 people who are looking for hangar space, and a spot can take years to open up, but Towle believes this will only alleviate half of that.

The airport also welcomed its first new fire truck in 22 years. The Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting Apparatus will be housed at Fire Station Four on the airport grounds.

St. Cloud Fire Chief Matt Love explaines the difference between this space-age machine and the average fire engine is that “this vehicle is set up so one person can drive it and control fire suppression through a joystick at the same time. Here’s a whole bunch of foam and a whole bunch of different stuff for fuel fires.”

It’s built to be operated by a minimal number of people yet provides the most possible fire suppression.

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