Reading Regional Airport has won a $138,366 grant to help rehabilitate its old south taxiway that started out as a runway.
“Reading Regional Airport is important to the region’s economy,” said U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., who announced the award. “This grant will allow the airport to improve its facilities to help ensure that it continues to be a safe and reliable hub of transportation for eastern Pennsylvania.”
The grant will pay for the engineering design needed to upgrade the taxiway, which will include a new stormwater system, said airport manager Terry P. Sroka.
The airport in Bern Township had coated part of the taxiway to hold it together, but the remainder is deteriorating, he said.
The upgrade is part of a larger project to build two hangars on the site of the World War II-era Hangar 501, razed several years ago.
The airport has been negotiating with two potential new tenants, but Sroka said they would need a better taxiway.
The south taxiway used to be the airfield’s Runway B, a shorter strip that ran southwest to northeast, but was closed years ago.
It now connects two existing hangars, for Atlantic Coast Aircraft Services and Reading Jet Center, and the area of the two proposed hangars with two longer runways.
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