UC Regional Airport Lighting Outages Repaired

The Upper Cumberland Regional Airport has been experiencing weather-related lighting outages.

Airport Manager Dean Selby said with so many lights in the facility, maintaining them is an ongoing process. Selby said while the outages are not as serious as they have been in the past, the last one that happened was at the worst possible time.

“We had one outage in the middle of the night this last month,” Selby said. “That’s kind of the worst time you want to have it go down is in the middle of the night when you’ve got planes on approach.”

Selby said there’s no guarantee with these kinds of lights. Selby said the fuses blow on these lights to protect the circuitry.

“Several years ago we’d had several problems with runway lights and we’ve got the majority of them fixed,” Selby said. “Because we’d had so many problems in the past, I just keep the board up to date on it when we do have it. We kind of track that so we know whether we’re having a serious issue or not.”

Selby said he believes the UC Regional Airport has one of the best lighting systems in Tennessee. He said aircraft can often times get into UC Regional, when they cannot land anywhere else.