Aviation helps rank Grand Forks airport as one of the busiest Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver almost always post the country’s highest airport operations counts. But thanks to the UND John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences’ aviation students, Grand Forks International Airport is posting flight statistics to rival those big airports, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In a story posted the FAA’s MyFAA employee Web site, the agency reported that on one day last summer, the controllers working in the Grand Forks tower handled 2,014 operations, surpassing both the Dallas-Fort Worth and Denver International’s flight counts. Not every day is so busy at Grand Forks. The average daily traffic count this year is closer to 1,000 operations, but that still represents a 45 percent jump in volume. Through November 2009, the tower managed 328,528 operations, about 90,000 more than in all of 2008, according to the FAA's official tally. That increase has come largely because of contracts UND signed with Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese airlines to train their pilots at the Odegard School. For the complete FAA story on UND flight ops impact at the Grand Forks airport, see https://employees.faa.gov/org/linebusiness/ato/news/field/story/index.cfm?newsId=60032 . -- Juan Pedraza, writer/editor, University Relations, juanpedraza@mail.und.edu, 777-6571