A portion of the shop roof has caved in and the airport authority wants to take it down as soon as possible.

There was a concern about asbestos in the shop but when the building was inspected very little asbestos was found and it was removed for $800.

The contractor has to get the demolition on a schedule and the Pratt County Landfill has to be notified of the demolition but once that is done it won't take long to bring the building down, said Reid Bell, airport manager.

More paper work has to be completed before the hangar can be torn down. The hangar was one of five originally on the base that was the Pratt Army Air Base , the first B-29 training field for pilots and crews in World War II.

The hanger was completed in 1943 and 65 years of Kansas's weather have taken their toll on the building. It has serious structural damage from weather including a wind gust of over 100 mph at the airport.

Since the hangar was part of the airbase it has historical significance and has to be thoroughly documented before it can be taken down. Two other hangars were destroyed in two separate fires and a third was destroyed by a tornado in 1965.

R & R Industries as the fifth hangar as a manufacturing building. While the other hangars could accommodate one B-29 the R & R hangar could handle two.

It is unknown when demolition will commence on the hangar but the Board decided to go ahead and approve the money for demolition. The concrete slab under the hangar will stay and the airport wants to rent out the space. They have had requests for flat storage space and believe they can make some money by renting the slab.

"I think we can rent that (slab) easy," Bell said.

The shop and the hangar aren't the only things the airport is removing. An old system used to direct aircraft to the airport is going to be retired. The Non Directional Beacon will be discontinued. The NDB transmitted a signal that pilots could pickup on their radios that would guide them to the airport.

A few pilots still use NDB but they seldom fly when they need the system.

Most aircraft now use a Wide Area Augmentation System to help guide pilots to the airport. Unlike a Global Positioning System that triangulates a position using three satellites, the WAAS uses 26 satellites and is much more precise than GPS and far exceeds the NDB, Bell said.

The board was alerted to a possibility of a wind farm group out of Chicago interested in purchasing land north of the airport for a wind farm. Bell said that before any construction takes place in the county that it has to cross the airport manager's desk to determine if the construction is a problem for the approaches that stretch miles from the airport. Bell will keep the board advised of the situation.

During a recent visit by the Army Corps of Engineers to look for environmental hazards left over from World War II, Bell notified the Corps that the base had a carbon tetrachloride problem.

Bell said he wanted it on the record that the problem existed. The Corps notified bell that cleaning up the carbon tetrachloride would be the airports problem and their responsibility to clean up.