Medical Air Operations to leave Horace Williams Airport

Horace Williams Airport isn’t much more than a 4,000-foot runway, a few trailer-like buildings and an open field of small planes and rusty utilities.

To get in during the day, you can drive into the gravel parking lot through the open gate. At night, you can enter the passcode that’s clearly printed on the closed gate (it’s 1-1-1-1).

In an age of ironclad airport security, Horace Williams is quaint even by small airport standards.

And, only a five-minute drive from campus, the University-owned airport is 420 quiet acres at a time when UNC is relentlessly expanding on all sides.

Not for much longer.

At the end of the month, the University’s Medical Air Operations will move from Chapel Hill to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, ending its 43-year residence and signaling the beginning of the end for Horace Williams Airport.

The move comes despite the fact that the airport, scheduled to be closed permanently to make space for Carolina North, will probably not close for at least a year.

And it has some faculty upset.

“For most of (the pilots), yes, it’s more inconvenient and more inconvenient for (medical faculty), particularly those that live in Chapel Hill,” said Dr. Tom Bacon, director of the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers (AHEC), the organization that oversees the Medical Air service.

But the discontent goes beyond mere inconvenience, Bacon said.

“There’s a lot of attachment to the old airport,” he said.

“There’s this long tradition of our people flying in and out of there,” he added. “Change is hard. Anytime, change is tough. So there’s that.”

A day of work for a Medical Air crew involves flying from Chapel Hill to locations across North Carolina. There, medical faculty will often each see dozens of patients, providing specialties not readily available in that section of the state, Bacon said.

“It’s enormously convenient for (patients) because these are pretty sick kids and the parents would have to take a day off or two days off to go up to Chapel Hill or Duke (University) to see these specialists,” he said.

The only change to this routine will be its point of departure, which will cost AHEC only slightly more money than staying in Chapel Hill would have, Bacon said.

And despite concerns from a small but vocal segment of faculty, administrators didn’t consider allowing Medical Air to stay in Chapel Hill after the completion of the Raleigh facility, said Anna Wu, director of facilities planning for the University.

“We always presumed that once the facility was available and open that they would move then,” she said. “Otherwise, we would have a vacant facility.”

Construction of the most pressing project to be built on the airport site, a research center, will likely not start for another year, Wu said.

“The closing of the airport will really be contingent on the pace of development of the infrastructure,” she said.

The research center is funded by non-state funds, not money from the state legislature, which has been withheld from Carolina North construction projects that will go up alongside the center.

“In this kind of an economic situation, what’s the legislature to do?” said Carolyn Elfland, associate vice chancellor for campus services. “The money’s just not there.”

Some county residents have opposed the airport’s presence, as well as the possible construction of another, for decades. Though a new airport was never planned in recent years, the nail in the coffin came last month when an N.C. Senate bill revoked the University’s power to build another airport.

For Bacon, it was public opposition that doomed the airport.

“If it hadn’t have been Carolina North it would have been something else,” he said.

Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.