St. Cloud Regional Airport Prepared for Winter Storm

ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- With the big snowstorm moving in to central Minnesota the St. Cloud Regional Airport is prepared and ready to keep the runway open.

Airport Director Bill Towle says they have the same equipment that they use at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He says they use a method called 'just in time plowing' to prepare for incoming airplanes.

We can time when the airplane is going to land and we know how long it takes to move a certain amount of snow in a certain amount of time and we can get out there and have it as good as possible when the airplane lands.

Towle says it isn't necessarily the falling snow but rather if the visibility goes down to a half mile or less then the plane can't land.

Then they have to hold or wait until there's a window to come in or maybe divert to another airport.

Allegiant Airlines has a plane from Mesa, Arizona that is scheduled to land Wednesday at 1:34 p.m. and take off at 2:19 p.m. Allegiant's flight from Punta Gorda, Florida is scheduled to land in St. Cloud on Thursday morning at 9:41 a.m. and leave at 10:26 a.m. Towle encourages people who are scheduled to be on those flights to go to Allegiant's website, enter their flight number, and track the flight status. He says it is ultimately up to the airline to decide whether a flight gets delayed or canceled.

He says on occasion the airport has had to shut down due to weather, but that hasn't happened in a long time.

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Towle says it is possible that flights scheduled to land at other airports like Minneapolis-St. Paul International may have to be diverted to St. Cloud during the storm.

We're ready for some of those, we can't handle a lot of airline-type traffic as a time, we can do three or four of them at a time and then we need to get them back in their air.