Armold Palmer Vegas Charters

How long is the longest runway at ORH??

The first big dividend of building a larger runway at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport near Latrobe paid off Tuesday when a 150-passenger jet took off en route to casinos in Laughlin, Nev Airport officials anticipate the MD-83 jet and other large aircraft will be a fixture on the tarmac, which was enlarged earlier this year to about 8,200 feet at a cost of $9 million.
"Hopefully this will lead to more junkets," said Westmoreland County Airport Authority spokesman Dwayne Pickels.

The airport typically hosts four charter companies that fly regular monthly trips to Atlantic City, N.J., but long-distance junkets that require bigger jets have been unable to fly out of the Unity Township facility because of the size of the runway. Officials initially embarked on the runway expansion project under the banner of safety improvements. The new runway was shifted away from Route 30 and commercial property as a means to keep arriving and departing aircraft away from the road and to reduce noise levels in nearby residential areas.

The side benefit of that project, though, is the ability for the airport to accommodate larger aircraft that can take more passengers to more distant locations. The airport provides daily commuter service to Detroit operated by Northwest Airlines Yesterday's charter flight to the small gaming town of Laughlin was the first nonstop long-distance flight not limited by the number of passengers and weight restrictions required by the shorter runway.

Preferred Casinos, which operates one of the regular Atlantic City junkets from the Palmer airport, sold out yesterday's flights. "In the past we considered these trips, but we didn't have the length on the runway. Now we're looking to do one of these a month," said John Mitchell, a partner with Preferred Casinos. In addition to its Laughlin and Atlantic City trips, Preferred Casinos, according to its Web site, operates charter service to Las Vegas, Reno, New Orleans and the Bahamas.