Airport Mesa has gotten a little bit bigger since January — about 10,000 cubic yards bigger, Sedona Airport interim general manager Ed Rose estimated. 

It’s the equivalent in volume to a giant blimp-worth of red boulders ranging in size from pebbles to lounge chairs, carried up Airport Mesa road one truckload at a time and then smoothed down into a flat surface by a backhoe. 

Workers from a residential development under construc­tion in West Sedona have been trucking up and placing the “terrific fill” near the beginning of runway 3 on the southwest corner of the mesa, Rose said. 

The amount of rock is so volumi­nous that it has transformed a small corner of the airfield, lifting some sections of a sloping parcel of land near the runway up to 10 to 12 feet above the previous ground-level. 

It’s early groundwork for a planned project to eventually extend taxiway A all the way down to the beginning of runway 3. The fill is necessary to raise the level of the ground where the taxiway extension is planned. Currently, the area slopes downward toward the edge of the mesa. 

But completion of that project is still several years away. 

The “Taxiway A Extension” project would alleviate problems associ­ated with having a taxiway that ends about 700 feet short of the start of the runway. The foreshortened taxiway on this side of the mesa means that aircraft wishing to use the full 5,129 feet of runway 3 for takeoff have to “back taxi,” or taxi on the runway itself for 700 feet before turning around 180 degrees. 

Rose said that the back taxi maneuver is “extremely dangerous.” With an extended taxiway, airplanes could enter the runway at its very end. Rose said the improvement would benefit all aircraft, but the ability to utilize the full length of the runway is especially important for jets. 

According to Sedona Airport’s Capital Improvement Plan, construc­tion on the Taxiway A Extension is not planned to begin until 2023, but Rose is taking advantage of fortu­itous circumstances to access free fill material. 

He said a tenant of the airport mentioned that a construction project in West Sedona was looking to dispose of a large amount of rock, and Rose decided to seize the opportunity. 

“I don’t have to pay a nickel,” Rose said. “While the material is available, we’re offsetting [project] costs $600- to $700,000.”