Boeing 737 stands out at Sugar Grove Township airport

SUGAR GROVE – Alice Osterman, who lives in the Prestbury subdivision near Sugar Grove, wondered what that Boeing 737 was doing parked at the Aurora Municipal Airport in Sugar Grove Township.

“It’s quite large for our airport,” Osterman said. “It dwarfs everything else.”

Then it flew over her house three times Friday, she said.

“It was annoyingly loud,” Osterman said. “I can’t believe we are the only people who noticed. ... Someone might have noticed the plane go over and not known it was from the airport.”

The plane is owned by Gogo Air, a company that provides in-flight Internet for airlines, company spokesman Steve Nolan said. The plane is a tenant of J.A. Air Center, which subleases several buildings at the airport.

“We provide connectivity services for planes,” Nolan said. “Many commercial aircraft in the U.S. have Wi-Fi access for planes. In order to get that stuff in the air, we need to test that stuff. We have an airplane to test our products and services.”

Nolan said the Boeing is named The Jimmy Ray, after one of the founders of Gogo.

“He came up with the concept of the technology that we use,” Nolan said.

For the time being, the aircraft will be doing more short flights as it tests new technology installed on it, Nolan said. Later on, it will fly to California to continue its technology testing.

Nolan said the 737 does stand out next to the much smaller Cessna and Piper aircrafts and corporate jets at the airport.

“It does look very funny out at that airport,” Nolan said.

Aurora Municipal Airport Manager Steve Andras said the company had a smaller jet at the airport for two years and had asked last fall if it could handle something as large as a Boeing 737.

Andras said the research plane would not be used for regular flights beyond a couple of times a month.

“We are excited about having someone out here with the technology corridor,” Andras said. “For someone like that to be based out here, it’s a feather in our area’s cap.”

The public airport is tower controlled from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., but planes can land 24 hours a day. Andras said it houses about 250 planes and handles 75,000 operations a year.

Although the Boeing is the largest plane at the airport right now, the largest to land there was a military transport plane, Andras said.

Osterman said she talked to someone at the airport who apologized for the noise and said the big plane would be flying “infrequently.”

“I just hope that ‘infrequently’ means infrequently,” Osterman said.