Pittsfield Community Development OKs Airport Project, Cannabis Amendment

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Community Development Board has supported plans for a new hangar at the airport and a change to the cannabis ordinance.

Lyon Aviation, located in the Pittsfield Municipal Airport, plans to remove an existing "T" style hangar and replace it with a new, 22,000-square-foot hangar.  The existing one is said to be small and in poor condition while the new build will accommodate a variety of plane sizes including a larger passenger jet.

"There's no traffic impacts, there's no utilities to speak of," Robert Fournier of SK Design Group explained.

"I'll say that we did review this at length with the airport commission in the city council and this is the way we were instructed to proceed was filing this site plan review and special permit application."

The application states that the need for additional hangar space is "well documented" by Lyon, Airport Manager Daniel Shearer, and the airport's 2020 master plan. The plan predicts that 15 additional hangar spaces will be needed by 2039 and this project can accommodate up to 10 smaller planes or a single large aircraft.

Lyon Aviation was founded in 1982 as a fix-based operator that provided fuel, maintenance, hangar services, charter, and flight instruction.

This is not the only project at the Tamarack Road airport, as the City Council recently approved a $300,000 borrowing for the construction of a new taxi lane. This will cover the costs of an engineering phase and will be reduced by federal and state grant monies that have been awarded to the airport.

The local share required is $15,000, with 95 percent covered by the Federal Aviation Administration and the state Department of Transportation's Aeronautics division.