Dow flies 7-minute flight — and stays home — the week of a key nuclear milestone

Dow flew its Bombardier CRJ-900, N892D, from MBS International Airport to... MBS International Airport on June 8, a seven-minute, 625-foot-high lap around the field that barely cleared the runway fence. The oddity of a flight that started and ended in Midland — Dow's own home base — suggests a maintenance or systems check rather than a business trip, but it lands the same week the company is celebrating a major regulatory milestone at its Texas chemical complex.

The same week this brief sortie took place, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a Finding of No Significant Impact for Dow and X-energy's proposed advanced nuclear reactor at the company's Seadrift Operations in Texas, per a corporate press release on May 18 [corporate.dow.com]. The Long Mott Generating Station would be the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor at a U.S. industrial site, supplying steam and electricity to a plant that produces more than four billion pounds of materials annually.

The flight pattern of N892D tells a more familiar story: the CRJ-900 has made five round trips between Baton Rouge and Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport since May 5, a shuttle route that mirrors Dow's supply chain and engineering team movements between its Louisiana operations and the Gulf Coast chemical corridor [celebplanes.com]. Those flights, unlike today's, carried the teams that are likely now focused on the Seadrift complex, where both a legal deadline — Texas's water-pollution lawsuit against Dow subsidiary Union Carbide — and a regulatory decision on plastic pellet discharges await.