Tucson Airport Wins $23 Million Grant for Major Airfield Project

AZ – Tucson International Airport (TIA) has been awarded a federal grant of nearly $23 million to help fund the latest phase of its $350 million airfield safety improvement project, which is the biggest construction program in the airport’s history.

The recently announced grant from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Improvement Program, which is funded by passenger surcharges, includes $18 million in discretionary funding, in addition to what TIA is entitled to base on its passenger volume.

TIA’s Airfield Safety Enhancement project will replace the shorter, parallel runway to the main runway at TIA with a new, full-length parallel runway to handle commercial airliners while reconfiguring taxiways for safer operations. The latest grant will fund about 91% of the total project cost of a phase of the airfield project that involves the construction of new outer taxiways on TIA’s main airfield.

The new runway is expected to be finished by 2024, or 2025, depending on the pace of funding, airport officials say. After that, the current main runway will be closed for construction and commercial traffic shifted to the new runway so work can proceed on new taxiways between runways, which will take another year or so.

TIA’s airfield project is being funded mainly with grants from the FAA, along with airport revenue and state grants. TIA also is expected to receive about $31 million in increments of just over $6 million annually over five years from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law last November.