24
OPERATIONS      
September 2026      AirportImprovement.com
MKG 
Five years ago, Muskegon County 
Airport (MKG) was close to 
shutting its doors to commercial 
service. The FAA was preparing to pull the 
West Michigan airfield’s Part 139 operating 
certificate, and there hadn’t been a leader 
on hand to manage the declining situation 
for one and a half years. The small airport 
that once anchored its community’s air 
connection to the rest of the country 
and world was quietly slipping toward 
irrelevance.
Today the story reads very differently. 
A dependable carrier provides daily 
roundtrip service to Chicago O’Hare 
International (ORD) from a freshly 
renovated terminal with a new roof. 
The café that sat dark for a decade is 
serving breakfast again. An air show that 
locals sorely missed for 17 years is back 
on the calendar. Hangars for general 
aviation planes are almost full, and overall 
passenger numbers are climbing at a 
rate that would make most small airports 
green with envy.   
Getting from the first paragraph to the 
second took the better part of five years, a 
rotating cast of managers, and a long list 
of projects tackled one at a time. 
Operating Certificate at Risk
When Rick Taig arrived 
in October 2020, the 
situation was about 
as serious as it gets. 
The FAA was only a 
few steps away from 
pulling the airport’s 
commercial operating 
certificate. 
Muskegon County, which owns 
and operates MKG, hired Taig as an 
independent airport management 
consultant at the urging of the Michigan 
Department of Aeronautics. He brought 27 
years’ experience in airport maintenance, 
operations, and security by the time he 
retired in 2020 as director of Willow Run 
Airport, which is owned by Wayne County, 
MI, and operated by the Wayne County 
Airport Authority. 
Channeling his other experience as a 
retired U.S. Air Force F-16 crew chief, 
Taig suspected the root problem was 
leadership—more specifically, a lack thereof. 
“MKG hadn’t had an airport manager for 
18 months,” he explains. In that vacuum, 
a five-person maintenance crew and one 
administrator had been trying to keep the 
airport running. No one was designated with 
Muskegon County Airport Rebuilds After 
Near Decertification, One Project at a Time
BY CYRUS ARYANI
RICK TAIG

View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.