Pearson Field gets (temporary) tower

• Project questions, concerns: Art Spillman, 503-415-6133, art.spillman@portofportland.com

• Aircraft noise, overflights: Noise hot line, 503-460-4100, 800-938-6647, pdxnoise@portofportland.com

• Event information/schedule a presentation: Brooke Berglund, 503-415-6532, brooke.berglund@portofportland.com

A historic airport made a little more history Friday when Pearson Field debuted its first air traffic control tower.

It’s a temporary installation, scheduled for a six-month stay while a renovation project at Portland International Airport alters some of the traffic density in local skies.

The Federal Aviation Administration provided the mobile control center and will staff it with personnel from the Portland International and Hillsboro, Ore. airports.

The south runway at PDX, which is closed for reconstruction, handled about 70 percent of the jet traffic, Scott Speer, an FAA air traffic manager, said Friday morning just after the Pearson control center went live.

“Now 100 percent of it is on the north runway” — the one closer to Vancouver, Speer said.

PDX air traffic will follow the same patterns as in the past on takeoffs as well as landings, but the shutdown of the south runway beginning at 9 a.m. Monday means there will be more jets closer to parts of Clark County, Port of Portland spokesman Steve Johnson said.

The Vancouver-based air controllers will ensure that the jets “stay safely segregated from Pearson traffic,” said Laura Schnei-der, the FAA support manager in Portland.

A couple of pilots who came by Pearson’s operations office earlier in the week to learn more about the transition figured that it doesn’t change things much.

“We’ve called PDX on an advisory basis,” one of them said. “Now it’s clearance.”

“They got it just right,” Schneid-er said after speaking with the pilots, who declined to give their names.

Pearson, one of the nation’s oldest airports, had gotten along without a control tower since its first aviation event — a dirigible landing in 1905. And that’s actually pretty typical, said airport manager Willy Williamson. Only about 1,000 U.S. airports have towers. The other 14,000 rely on a “rules of the road” system that pilots have observed for approximately 85 years.

Pearson averages about 140 flights a day, with more traffic on weekends, in the summer and good weather.

The FAA uses mobile centers frequently for emergencies in remote areas, like forest fires, and at temporary high-traffic events like air shows, Speer said.

The working area of the tower is a control center, about 8 feet by 10 feet, which is still mounted on the trailer — wheels and all — that brought it here from its previous assignment in Montana.

The trailer provides a bigger platform, Speer said. A crane hoisted the whole package atop a cargo container to give controllers have a better view of the airfield.

The deck is a dozen or so feet above the runway.

The control tower will operate daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. through Oct. 6. When the Pearson tower isn’t staffed, Pearson pilots will be able to contact PDX.

The work at Portland International will reconstruct the airport’s south runway, which has been pounded by years of use. In prior phases, the Port of Portland rehabilitated the north runway, and extended it from 8,000 feet to 9,825 feet. With the additional length, it can handle larger aircraft that had been using the south runway.

There also will be increased use of the cross-wind runway, which is oriented north/south, Johnson said.