Centennial - the Little Airport That Could

Snow removal a specialty of award-winning airfield

Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 27, 2006 at midnight

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When basketball superstar Allen "The Answer" Iverson needed to fly into snowbound Denver to launch his career with the Nuggets, his new employer had The Question.

Where could the multimillionaire point guard safely touch down in time for last Friday night's tipoff at the Pepsi Center?

Denver International Airport was out of the question - having been shut down by the Blizzard of 2006 last week for a record 45 hours.

"Is there a military base that's open?" asked Mark Warkentien, the Nuggets vice president of basketball operations. He feared Iverson's arrival might be "next to impossible."

But A.I. found The Answer in one of the most reliable - and busiest - general aviation airports in the country: Centennial Airport in Arapahoe County.

Call it the Little Airport That Could.

Centennial is an astonishing seven-time winner (plus one honorable mention) of a national snow-removal award for large general aviation airfields. That achievement gives it high-flying popularity among corporate-jetting executives who want to get where they're going quickly - and safely.

"We're clearly the airport of choice, and that is because of the Balchen-Post awards that we have won," said Robert Olislagers, the airport's executive director, referring to the prize - named partly after Arctic explorer Bernt Balchen - for snow-removal safety sponsored by the American Association of Airport Executives.

"Our crews know how to remove snow."

For the record: Along with most area airports, Centennial was shut down last week for about 27 hours by nearly 3 feet of blowing snow.

And Olislagers isn't crowing that his three-runway, 1,400-acre airfield opened 18 hours earlier than its behemoth commercial cousin, DIA, one of the world's largest airports.

Given the wind-driven, whiteout conditions, Olislagers said, airports big and small were just slammed.

"At one point it was just kind of useless to keep pushing the snow and watch it all come blowing back," he said. "The folks at DIA have just an awful lot of snow to move out there. My hat's off to those guys."

What's the secret to Centennial's snow-sweeping success?

He credits his operations director, Lorie Hinton, and maintenance chief, David Zarlengo, with crafting the "best snow plan" in the business.

"Long before the snow starts to fly out here, they meet with all of of the major tenants," Olislagers said. "We go over the plan and we prioritize what we attack first. We want to make sure we stay operational. It is never good to get a call from the chief pilot or a CEO and having to explain why the runway isn't open."

The art of snow removal "is very much a ballet," he said, with a key supervisor dubbed the "snow boss" orchestrating five plows and a snowblower.

In blinding snow, the plows become invisible, so communication is critical, with the snow boss radioing the control tower when to halt air traffic on a runway.

The plows sweep the airstrip in a staggered formation, "each vehicle just behind and to the right of the other," so they "hand off" the plowed snow to one another until its pushed off the field, Olislagers said.

In heavy wet snow, the plows move more tightly together and make more passes to clear the weightier mass. In fluffy powder, the plows spread out more, so they're not "just rearranging" the free-floating flakes.

There's a science to snow removal, with maintenance officials relying on runway temperature sensors to alert them if they can use de-icing chemicals. If it's too cold, spraying runways with de-icers is a waste of vital time.

The planes don't start landing or taking off again until the snow boss ensures all the equipment is cleared from the runway.

It's not just that Centennial is the second- busiest general aviation field - after one in Van Nuys, Calif. - in the nation. With 325,000 takeoffs and landings last year (and a whopping 436,000 in 2000), it ranks among the top 25 airports for total takesoffs and landings in the U.S. That's more than than San Francisco International or JFK International in New York.

While DIA was still digging out last Friday, Centennial had one of its busiest days, as more than 1,000 corporate jets swarmed the airfield to pluck executives stranded in the Mile High City by the blizzard.

"Our folks take great, great pride in being open longer than most airports and shutting down for shorter periods of time," Olislagers said.

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