Airport Improvement Program

This is one in a series of reports reviewing the Airport Improvement Program, the nation's major program for planning and improving its airport infrastructure. One set-aside under the program, the Military Airport Program, was created in 1990 to help convert military airports located in congested cities to civilian use. GAO concludes that most current and former military airports in the program do not meet the conversion goals established for this program; meanwhile, only 23 percent of funding has been allocated to the types of conversion activities identified in the legislation that established the conversion program.

GAO found that: (1) 9 of the 12 MAP airports do not meet program goals of increasing system capacity and converting current or former military airports to joint or full civilian use; (2) FAA felt pressured to select the maximum number of military airports for conversion despite its confusion about what types of airports the program was intended to assist and lack of an inventory of potential candidates; (3) five MAP airports are not located in congested metropolitan areas and are unlikely to increase capacity; (4) nine airports are already operating as joint or civilian airports and many of them already have the facilities the program was designed to develop; and (5) FAA has allocated only 23 percent of MAP funding to conversion-related projects and is funding relatively low-priority projects at many airports that no longer have conversion needs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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