Georgetown, Del., Nov. 28, 2006: An old, long-abandoned runway at the Sussex County Airport will find new life soon as an alternate flight path for smaller aircraft.

Demolition crews from Dixie Construction Co. earlier this month began breaking up the concrete surface of Runway 10/28 at the former Navy airfield outside Georgetown. The runway, originally one of three built in the 1940s, was last used by aircraft in the 1970s. Once the demolition work is finished, most likely by early spring, preparation will begin for its reconstruction into a usable, crosswind runway.

Construction is expected to begin in fall 2007, and take about a year to complete. Ninety-five percent of the funding for the approximately $5 million demolition and reconstruction project will come through the Federal Aviation Administration.

A crosswind runway is a strip secondary to an airport’s main runway, and generally aligned perpendicular to the main runway. The crosswind runway gives pilots an alternate landing and take-off option in the event winds are coming from a direction other than what is typical for a particular airport.

For the Sussex County Airport, the new crosswind runway will be aligned in a west-to-east fashion. The main runway, meantime, is aligned southwest to northeast to match the area’s predominant wind flow. With this new crosswind runway, pilots of small planes will be able to land safely regardless of wind direction.

Jim Hickin, project engineer for the Sussex County Airport, said the new crosswind runway, once completed, will give smaller aircraft a wider, longer – and ultimately safer – path to land on and take off from during crosswind conditions. The new crosswind runway will be 3,070-feet long and 75-feet wide.

The crosswind runway it will replace, currently a redesigned taxiway at the middle of the airfield, is only 50-feet wide and 2,330-feet long. That strip will be restored to a taxiway for aircraft to use to get to and from the newly built crosswind runway.

“This will improve the all-around safety margin for pilots who use our airport,” Mr. Hickin said. “And the new runway will be more in line with federal design standards for general aviation airports like ours.”

Mr. Hickin said crosswind runways are especially important for smaller, lighter aircraft, which are more susceptible to crosswinds than their larger counterparts.

Sussex County Airport is a general aviation field that records more than 50,000 landings and take-offs annually, and is popular with a mix of small private and large commercial-type aircraft.