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WEST POINT — The new manager of the Lanett Regional Airport was the guest speaker at Thursday’s noon hour meeting of the West Point Rotary Club, held in the banquet room at Johnny’s Pizza in downtown West Point. Craig Stapleton has been on the job since the first of the year.

He’s a native of southwest New Jersey, went to high school in Altamonte Springs, Florida and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Auburn University. He received a commission in the U.S. Navy through the Auburn ROTC program and was in that branch of service for 24 years, While in the Navy, he earned an MBA from City University in Seattle, Washington and a Masters in Education from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, he flew Navy EA-6B Prowler jets on electronic jamming missions. He retired from the Navy in 2011 and taught Navy ROTC courses in New Mexico for 13 years before relocating to Lanett earlier this year.

Being in the local area has been a homecoming for his wife. She’s the former Laura Maddox, who graduated from Lanett High School in 1980. She was a member of the Golden Panther Band while in high school and has lots of relatives in the local area.

Stapleton has been into flying since his youth and met Laura when she was working at the Auburn airport. “I had to work hard to get her, but marrying her was the best thing I ever did,” he said. “Our life together has been an adventure. We have been all over the world.”

They have been in the Pacific Northwest, an area Stapleton calls “a truly gorgeous part of the country,” and in the Land of Enchantment – New Mexico.

Stapleton has done deployments on carriers both U.S. coasts, once in Norfolk, Virginia and another time in Bremerton, Washington.

“I got to see much of the world and loved it,” he said. “Most places you go to in the service makes you really appreciate living in the United States.”

He singles out Italy, Dubai and Singapore as especially great places to be.

He had around 140 students in his JROTC classes in New Mexico. He said there are highs and lows in dealing with that many kids in a day. On some days you want to hug each and every one of them, but then there are days when it’s the last thing in the world you wanted to do.

One of Stapleton’s specialties as a teacher was marksmanship. He’s proud of what some of his students have accomplished and keeps up with them. He will soon be flying to Ohio to see one of his former students take part in the national finals.

Stapleton said he likes the ground-floor opportunity to be at Lanett Regional. It’s a chance to see a small airport grow into a busy place.

He’s confident that will happen once Lanett gets a jet fuel farm. an expanded taxiway and apron and hangars start to go up. “We are working on getting our infrastructure in good shape so we can grow,” he said. “We need a parallel taxiway. The one we have now is one-third of what it needs to be.”

He commended his assistant, Peter Kambeitz, and the city’s airport consultant, Goodwyn, Mills & Cawood, for being great to work with.

The taxiway could cost between two and three million dollars, but there’s abundant grant money available from the FAA to help with such projects. A side benefit to such a project is that nearby land can be graded and ready to go for hangar projects.

Stapleton has been talking to people who want to build hangars at Lanett Regional and to people who want to lease them. “The demand is there,” he said. “Once you start one of these projects, it takes about one full year to build a hangar. I think we can be selling jet fuel out there within the next year.”

The sale of jet fuel is where the money is for an airport like Lanett. While a small, propeller-driven plane will use between 12 and 15 gallons of fuel in an hour, a private jet will use between 100 and 250 gallons in an hour.

One thing Lanett Regional has going for it is the fact that the airport in Auburn is becoming way too busy and backup options are needed. Auburn University has a burgeoning flight training program. Just a few years go there were only five planes based there for this. That number has grown to more than 80.

Auburn student pilots are now using the Lanett airport for touch and go maneuvers. With its new runway that’s more than a mile in length, Lanett is the ideal location for a backup airport for Auburn.