Crescent City’s Airport Has a Weight Problem — and It May Be Terminal.

Opinion by Samuel Strait

October 28, 2025 - I have recently been attending the Border Coast Regional Airport Authority (BCRAA) meetings as a result of a request to the County of Del Norte for a line of credit by the Authority. What a mess! Not only is the board dysfunctional, but leadership is blind to the impending disaster found in a pointless rehabilitation of its runways and taxiways.

It is not as if the BCRAA hasn’t experienced its share of difficulties over the past decade. This has become a time when poor leadership on the part of the BCRAA has come to a head. FAA requirements for airport infrastructure improvements, a disaster in the form of the decision to build a new terminal falling apart after only six years, and a general abandonment of passengers utilizing the Crescent City Airport are just a taste of the issues plaguing the airport.

The Authority’s current relationship with its customer base has led to a significant decline in potential customers and subsequent loss of income. It is far more difficult to increase those numbers when asking customers to utilize commercial air service that doesn’t take them where they want to go. For a decade, the BCRAA has tried and failed to interest local air travelers in flights to Oakland, Portland, and now Hawthorne in the L.A. basin. No luck. Carriers have come and gone with no appreciable improvement in numbers.

One would think the solution would be to attract a regional carrier to fly to San Francisco (SFO) or Los Angeles (LAX). Not so fast. It appeared initially that it would require an expensive lengthening of both runways to accommodate larger regional jets — a cost currently beyond the BCRAA’s pocketbook, which is teetering on the brink of insolvency.

Recent developments indicate the BCRAA has an even larger problem, one it is unlikely to resolve. Before getting to the unsolvable, it is important to recognize that the current operation of the airport is not sustainable for many more years without incurring substantial expense to all participating entities. It has insufficient income to operate and to accomplish the corrections to airport facilities demanded by the FAA. Even if those corrections were completed soon, it would only be a short-term fix before the problems repeat endlessly.

The BCRAA has a weight problem. Refurbishing or lengthening the runways will not make the airport a success. My mistake — just as roadways have weight limits, so do airport runways. The landing of twenty-ton, thirty-passenger jets on Jack McNamara Field’s runways is the most likely cause of the “alligator” cracking on the surface of those runways over the past six years. Larger regional jets are much heavier. The geology supporting the current location as a regional airport will become financially unsustainable for continued commercial air traffic.

If enplanements can’t grow, inflation and maintenance will push the airport into requiring more revenue from its members — or the return of the airport to its owner with all of its accompanying financial woes. The sooner members of the BCRAA recognize this problem, the smaller the future financial impact will be.

It’s an unfortunate situation, but common sense and practicality are more important than fantasy, especially for those who pay the bills. We, particularly in this county, continue to pay for services we cannot afford and that truly benefit only a tiny fraction of our population. Time to recognize that things built on a foundation of sand and water need to be put out of their misery. Time to shut the airport down.