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Port authority chairman says daily flights still ‘look real good’
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
Western Reserve Port Authority members met in private Wednesday with the president of the company trying to begin daily air service at the Youngstown- Warren Regional Airport, but not to quiz him on his financial challenges, the board’s chairman said.
“It was all positive. It was how positive things are with the proposed flights from Youngstown to Chicago,” chairman Ron Klingle said of the discussion the board had with Scott A. Beale of Aerodynamics Inc. (ADI) of Beachwood, Ohio, and Atlanta.
“We’re keeping our fingers crossed and hoping in the next couple of weeks we’ll be learning that they’ll be starting up flights. At the moment, things look real good,” Klingle said after the 20-minute executive session at the end of the port authority’s regular monthly meeting.
Beale’s company has been providing the U.S. Department of Transportation with information since June about its fitness to operate the service.
ADI has proposed offering daily flights in 50-passenger aircraft between Youngstown and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.
The service could begin as early as March and bring daily air service back to the Mahoning Valley for the first time in more than a decade.
But the DOT’s Air Carrier Fitness Division asked ADI last month to provide it with additional information about a civil suit decided by a jury in Virginia earlier this year, that found that Beale defrauded a business partner when he convinced him to invest $500,000 in ADI.
Klingle says the civil suit and Beale’s bankruptcy, which was completed earlier this year, are “all behind us, and I’m pretty sure that’s all behind the Department of Transportation.”
Klingle said the only reason for the meeting with Beale was to meet him. “And we’re very impressed,” he added. “I think he’s a good gentleman, and I think it’s a perfect company to begin this service.”
Don Hanni III told his fellow port-authority members Wednesday’s meeting will perhaps be his last because the Mahoning County commissioners have not appointed him to another term.