Governor Landry has announced that Chennault Airport has secured a $20 million grant from FEMA that will be used to build a 37,000 square-foot paint hangar. Chennault International Airport executive director Kevin Melton says the new hangar will expand airport operations, and its main use will be to paint airplanes.
“It’s from government, to commercial, to private jets. And I’m not talking about smaller planes, although they’ve done a few of those, but we’re talking about large commercial-sized aircraft,” Melton said.
Melton says the construction is expected to begin in February and will take a little over a year to complete. He says once constructed, the paint hangar will support more than 100 additional jobs.
“Those will be folks painting airplanes. Those are jobs that we can hire from our local community,” Melton noted.
Melton says Chennault is receiving this grant to help the airport recover from the damages sustained during Hurricane Laura.
“We had $130 million in damage, just at this airport alone. So there’s programs out there that we could capitalize on. And so we took advantage of that,” Melton said.
