By Katie Northcott, News Director
Tullahoma Airport Authority (TAA) Chairman Karla Smith spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Tullahoma Airport Steering Committee on Tuesday, March 24, catching the committee up on the airport’s struggles over the past year.
Tullahoma Mayor Lynn Sebourn formed the Steering Committee to provide support to the TAA after Smith discovered last year that the airport had failed to follow proper procedures. The committee will review matters like staffing, economic impact, safety, business development, and public relations and make recommendations to the TAA.
The committee includes Sebourn, Smith, TAEDC Director Kelly North, Interim City Administrator Jeff Damron, Tullahoma Finance Director Sue Wilson, Pat Eagan, Josh Abramson, Charles Parish, and Tom Gillard.
Smith, who said she had been a part of the TAA off and on for 15 years, gave the committee a brief history of some of the concerns she has raised over the past year as TAA chairman.
Smith said she became TAA chairman after the previous chairman passed away in 2024. Observing operations, she began to have some concerns.
“More importantly was our fuel sales and how we tracked our fuel sales and how we were charging our customers,” Smith said. “Still hand-written tickets. We were just very, very dated in how we were doing business.”
Smith reached out to Atlas, a sales system that the airport had access to but was not being utilized. Atlas did some training, and the airport slowly adopted the system.
She began asking more questions after a plane full of skydivers crashed shortly after take-off in June 2025. Smith said her main concerns were about the whether the airport had the proper insurance that would cover the TAA’s liability. At the time, she was told the airport had proper insurance. She later found out that was not true.
“I asked for copies of documentation of it at that time. Unfortunately, I was not given it,” Smith said.
Additionally, Smith realized that the airport did not have an FAA-approved drop zone for skydiving. She said the airport still does not have an approved drop zone because getting an approved drop zone is “low on the list of priorities” after some other concerns were uncovered.
Smith said that on July 2, tension began to grow between the TAA and airport staff. She said some former staff resisted the implementation of the Atlas sales system.
According to Smith, “things got interesting” in September after she attended an event in Murfreesboro and started talking to other airport officials about how they ran their businesses.
Titan is the airport’s fuel supplier.
“Cliff note version: discovered all of these Titan manuals that I didn’t see at our airport,” Smith said. “My eyes were opened to their bookkeeping, their record keeping, their quality control keeping, everything that they did to maintain their fuel records. And we weren’t doing it here.”
After talking to airport staff and reviewing the one record book she could find, Smith contacted the airport’s Titan fuel representative with her concerns. A representative came the next day and did an inspection that lasted over six hours.
“That’s when we uncovered a lot of discrepancies. Things that just weren’t being done like they should’ve been being done,” Smith said.
Then-Airport Manager Jon Glass retired on October 20, and John Miller served as Interim Airport Manager until current Interim Airport Manager Ashley Udick was appointed in November.
A fuel spill occurred at the airport on October 30, shortly after Glass’s retirement, costing the city around $750,000. After the fuel spill, the she and Miller discovered that the airport was not properly covered by insurance.
Smith said she and Miller also discovered that the airport’s leases were “in bad shape.”
“We were way under market. We were not following the 2024 guidelines the Tennessee Department of Aviation had put out,” Smith said. “Names weren’t correct, spelling wasn’t correct, terms were–nothing matched. The agreements that were being used were not even the ones that were approved by our attorney, so I don’t know where they came from.”
Despite the airport’s recent challenges, Smith and Sebourn expressed optimism about the airport’s future because of the progress made since Udick became interim airport manager.
“It seems pretty clear to us just looking at the first rough numbers … we’re thinking within a few years, we can be at the break-even point,” Sebourn said.
The City of Tullahoma currently subsidizes the airport. If the airport could sustain itself, it would save the city around $160,000 per year.
Smith asked for the committee’s help with setting checks and balances, updating policies and procedures, and updating minimum standards.
The next committee meeting has been scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on April 7. The committee will discuss safety.
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