Halifax County Commissioners Monday accepted the five-year strategic plan for the Halifax-Northampton Regional Airport — a plan which introduces several improvements to the facility and seeks to boost its marketing efforts.

“The strategic plan calls on our organization to maximize our assets and play to our unique strengths while acknowledging and addressing our weaknesses and threats,” Airport Authority Chairman Ralph Johnson said in the preface of the document. “Most important of all, this is a plan developed for our Airport Authority leadership and staff to guide and direct collaborative efforts to achieve an exciting future for our airport.”

The plan, Johnson wrote, includes two key growth elements – location and general aviation.

Johnson said executing the initiatives will require a great deal of organizational focus and teamwork, “but I am confident that the results will deliver important benefits to the service we deliver to our customers and our community, to the competitive and financial strength of our enterprise and to our working environment and culture.”

In presenting the plan to the board, Lee Padrick of the North Carolina Department of Commerce, presented a slide presentation and noted the plan was created between the local airport authority, the department of transportation aviation division, commerce and the rural planning program.

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The transformative goals are to leverage the facility’s closeness to the interstate and Lake Gaston and to become the leading general aviation airport in what is described as the greater Roanoke Valley.

To reach these goals an airport-centric marketing plan needs to be developed which advertises the economic impacts of the facility, the advantages of basing aircraft at IXA, updating its website and improving governmental coordination. “Other actions include a regional marketing plan that includes working with local attractions, developing a link to the passenger trains in the region, partnering with local tourism development and working with the small business community, events, and food trucks to attract people.”

General aviation projects include increasing hangar space, acquiring a fuel truck, developing a capital improvement plan and work to include the Horizons Parkway – Halifax Corporate Park – in the state transportation improvement plan.

Johnson told the board the maintenance hangar project has already been started and he has been talking with New Dixie Oil Company about a fuel truck, which is needed when corporate jets land at IXA instead of the pilots having to park at the fuel farm. “We’re looking at grants and other opportunities,” he said.

The plan recommends working with the community college on developing a flight instruction class as well as a ground school course, creating a flight training school, the purchase of a rental plane and working toward providing onsite mechanical service.