Jim Galloway:  Hi, I’m Jim Galloway.  I’m the Executive Director of the Valdosta Lowndes County Airport Authority and the Airport Manager at the Valdosta Regional Airport.  What I’d like to talk to you today about is a little bit about what an Airport Authority is and what we do at Valdosta.  The Valdosta Lowndes County Airport Authority was created by legislation in the Georgia State Assembly.  So we’re actually a political subdivision of the state of Georgia.  So we enjoy the same status as any other political subdivision in the state such as Lowndes County. 

The members of the Airport Authority of which we have six, we have three that are appointed by the City of Valdosta Council, and we have three that are appointed by the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners.  And they serve for four year terms.  We have a wide array of people that are on our board.  Right now we have a car dealer.  We have a doctor.  We have a lawyer.  We have a financial investor, and we have a travel agent.  I believe I covered all six of them there.  But they’re very interested in the well-being of the Valdosta Regional Airport.  We are called a FAA, our Federal Aviation Administration part 139.  What that means is that our airport has airline service.  We have three arrivals and three departures a day with Delta connection that goes to Atlanta.  From Atlanta you can go anywhere in the world.  We have an early morning flight, a mid morning flight.  I call it the suppertime flight and we have one that arrives back in here around 8:45 at night.  It’ll overnight and it’ll be the early morning flight the next morning that leaves around 5:45.  Those times vary from time to time.  We have our longest runway is 8,002 feet long, and being that we’re winnersville , there are several other airports in the state of Georgia that had 8,000 foot long runway, so when we’re extending our runway to 8,000, some of the local politicians said let’s go a little bit better, and so we have some bragging rights.  So now we have the third longest runway in the state.  Only Atlanta, Hartsfield, and Savannah International have a longer runway than what we have here at Valdosta.  So we can handle pretty much any type of aircraft that’s out there. 

Currently the Delta connection flies a Canada Air Regional jet, 50-seat jet that comes in.  We do, during football season, handle larger aircrafts such as a MD-88 or a 737 that the Valdosta State University football team, when they travel in the air then they’ll come in and out of Valdosta as well as sometimes their opposition will as well.  We have about 55 aircraft based here at the Valdosta Airport.  When you drive by you don’t see too many of them, because they’re all neatly tucked away in hangars to keep them out of the elements.  Of which we have two jet aircraft, one turbo prop aircraft, several multi-engine, and the remainder single-engine aircraft.  On a day when you come out to Valdosta airport, we have about 15,000 operations in a month right now.  That’s considerably down from when the economy was better, but that’s roughly 50 per day.  So if you’d like to come out, we have a subway restaurant in the passenger terminal and an outdoor observation area with a nice picnic area if you’d like to bring your family out and come out and watch some airplanes and eat lunch or early supper or something, we’d love to have you out to the Valdosta Airport.