Noticing the demand for new hangars, the Truckee Tahoe Airport District approved the plans for new hangars at its board meeting last week.

“Now, there are about 205 hangars,” said TTAD General Manager David Gotschall. “We have a bigger demand than supply,” he added, while pointing to several airplanes parked outside on the tarmac.

Gotschall said that there are already people signed up on a waiting list for a hangar, and they are simply addressing the demand. He added that, with the demand, they wouldn’t be trying to sell the new hangars – they are already sold.

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“There are 180 people on a waiting list; they come here anyway,” Gotschall said. “It’s a lot safer to have the plane locked up instead of outside.”

They recently acquired land from the Joerger family, and have gone through the planning commission and town council, and are ready to begin the first of 11 phases of their hangar project.

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The first part that will be started, Gotschall said, will be the soil work and infrastructure, scheduled for later this summer and up to mid-October. He said that they hope to have the first set of hangars completed by next summer and have it occupied almost immediately.

The district also plans to start constructing Soaring Way, a road that will connect the Highway 267 bypass with Airport Road, which was part of the deal it made with the Town of Truckee. That project alone will take approximately five years, Gotschall said.

He also said that the 11-phase construction is an on-going project, and should be completed over the next 10 to 20 years. The low proposal for the first phase, Gotschall said, is $796,000, and the entire project should approach approximately $20 million.

Gotschall and Assistant General Manager Mike Scott stressed that, although they are increasing the number of hangars, they are not necessarily increasing the size of the airport or the number of flights taking off and landing. In fact, Gotschall said that he believes the number of flights going in and out should stay about the same, or even decrease. The way it would decrease, he said, is people who store their planes at the Reno airport, but fly mainly out of Truckee.

“Expanding the hangars doesn’t mean more flights. It just means more planes are stored here,” Scott said.

The TTAD is also working on a new Comprehensive Land Use Program, which Gotschall said is “grossly out of date.”

The last CLUP was established for the airport in 1988, but times – and planes – have changed. They have been working on new flight patterns and investigating the best ways to be an asset to the community, while limiting the public’s awareness that there is a plane flying overhead.

They have produced pilot cards that they hand out and also have on the airport Web site, http://www.truckeetahoeairport.com, that show the take-off and landing flight patterns they feel least disturb Truckee and the surrounding communities.

With the new hangars and the update of the CLUP, Gotschall and Scott said the airport hopes to keep its customers and Truckee happy.