Oct. 17--The largely empty, 1950s-era airport terminal at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport will soon be a thing of the past.

The regional airport will receive a $13.3 million federal stimulus program grant toward construction of a new, $18.8 million air traffic control tower and radar center. Officials estimate the new tower project will create 140 construction jobs.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood was joined Friday at the airport by Sen. Bob Casey, Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, D-11, Nanticoke, and several local officials and members of the aviation community for the announcement of the grant, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Construction of the tower will begin in December, and it is scheduled to be operating in 2011, said airport director Barry Centini. After testing the new system, the old terminal will be razed.

While the airport has the Joseph M. McDade Terminal, which opened in 2006, it has been without a new control tower.

About 40 Federal Aviation Administration workers use the current tower in the old terminal, which was built in 1959. When the FAA was consolidating facilities several years ago, some of the FAA operations -- and jobs -- were nearly removed from the airport because there was not a new tower, said Phil Gallagher, president of the air traffic controllers union at the airport. The airport's radar center, he said, controls about 250,000 flights annually within a 50-mile radius.