Airport bustling

City proposing improvements

As Kevin Pentico gathered his luggage at Columbia Regional Airport, he had just one complaint about his Delta flight from Memphis on the 34-seat turboprop plane.

“It’s so loud,” Pentico said. “Instead of peanuts, they should pass out earplugs.”

Nevertheless, Pentico is sold on the airport. He lives in the Lake of the Ozarks area and in the past used the Springfield airport because it’s a shorter drive from home. But he changed his itinerary to Columbia for this trip to North Carolina to visit his ailing mother and is planning to fly out of Columbia Regional again in February for one simple reason: It’s cheaper.

“It’s about an hour and a half drive for me to get to the airport, but when I’m saving $150, it is well worth it,” Pentico said.

Although Pentico was lured in by the cheaper flights, fellow mid-Missourians are discovering other benefits of Columbia Regional. There’s free parking, it doesn’t take two hours to get there by car (as it does if they fly out of St. Louis or Kansas City), the security checks are fast, and the flight goes to a hub airport (St. Louis and Kansas City are not hub airports).

The traffic at Columbia Regional Airport is now the highest it’s been since 2002, and on average 80 percent of the seats are filled on the three daily flights to and from Memphis International Airport.

The deal providing air service to the hub airport, which began in August 2008, helped rejuvenate Columbia Regional.

In addition, the Missouri Department of Transportation provided the city with an $80,000 marketing grant that’s been used to promote the airport’s use.

Regional leaders have also pitched in.

“We’ve been trying to advocate for the airport,” said Mike Downing, director of Connecting Our Regional Economies. “It’s important for the whole region. Communities, the university and all types of businesses rely on good air transportation, so the more flights to major markets, the better.”

Now the city and supporters of the airport are about to present their plan for future growth. They intend to present to the Columbia City Council next month a master plan with projects that would cost about $64 million, including $16.5 million in local funds, during the next 20 years. The highlights of the plan are to:

• Extend and repair the two runways
• Buy some adjacent land
• Renovate the terminal
• Expand hangar space

The Airport Advisory Board has been working on this version of the master plan for the past year, according to Airport Manager Kathy Frerking.

“The FAA likes to see airports do an update every seven to 10 years,” Frerking said. “We look at our facilities to see what we need to do to accommodate our needs and look out to the future when we’ll be even bigger.”

One of the major components of the master plan is extending both the main runway and the smaller perpendicular runway and to repair the pavement on both. Frerking said the goal is to begin construction on the runways within the next three to five years.

The smaller cross-winds runway will be fixed first to make it better equipped to accommodate commercial planes while the main runway is improved.

“Now that we’re doing so well with air service, we certainly don’t want to do anything to damage the numbers we have right now,” Cecil said of the plan to keep air traffic moving.

But the discussion surrounding the runway development hasn’t always been just about how or when to improve the runways. The runways at the Columbia Regional Airport intersect, but larger airports such as Kansas City International have been changing to parallel runways. Cecil said the advisory board discussed proposing parallel runways but decided it would be too expensive and time-consuming.

“The FAA prioritizes their project funding, and for us to go with parallel runways would require a lot more funding and land acquisition,” Frerking said.

The airport held a public meeting in August about potential land acquisitions, but Frerking said the master plan is preliminary and is just an outline of what they want to do.

The advisory board is expected to endorse the plan during its monthly meeting Wednesday, Cecil said. The next steps are getting the plan through a public hearing and approved by the Council. Cecil is optimistic the Council will back the proposal because there is more “positive attention” surrounding the airport than in previous years.

“When Bill Watkins became city manager, things started to change,” Cecil said. “He’s a big supporter of how to make things work at the airport.”

The airport’s resurgence comes after a number of years of lackluster performance and upheaval.

Delta is the fourth airline carrier in less than nine years. It’s faring much better than the last airline, Air Midwest. In 2007 Air Midwest’s passenger numbers dropped below the 10,000 mark, which put the airport in danger of losing its Essential Air Service designation and the accompanying federal subsidy of about $1 million per year.

Air Midwest/US Airways Express stopped flying to and from St. Louis that year and just had service to Kansas City. Then in July of 2008, the number dropped to zero because the airport was between air carriers — Air Midwest/US and Mesaba/Northwest Airlines (now Delta).

Mesaba/Northwest Airlines competed against two other airline carriers that proposed air service with St. Louis and Kansas City. The City Council endorsed service with Memphis because it is a hub airport, and the Federal Aviation Administration agreed.

“In the past, with our flights to Kansas City and St. Louis, people could fly from Columbia to catch a flight, or they could drive and catch that same flight — that’s not the case anymore,” Cecil said. “If a plane (coming into Columbia) got delayed for an hour or two, people started feeling like they were wasting time because they could already have been back in Columbia instead of waiting on a flight.”

As numbers on the Delta flight continue to surpass numbers from recent years and people in the regional area embrace flying through a hub airport, the discussion of expanding to include other airlines that fly to additional airports continues.

“(Memphis) is very successful, and it’s been well received by customers,” Downing said. “And this success gives us ammunition to go after airlines in other markets like Dallas or Chicago.”

Frerking agreed that an air carrier that went to hub airports in Chicago or Dallas would be an ideal future acquisition because of their relatively close proximity to Columbia.

“Airlines are cutting capacity and cutting routes because of the economy and high fuel costs,” Frerking said. “Acquiring another airline is not something that will happen overnight. It is something we’re continuing to pursue.”

In the more immediate future, the plan for Columbia Regional Airport is to redo seating in the terminal area.

“We’re hoping to have it finished in the next several months,” Frerking said. “We need to figure out more exact funding to see if we have money to do all the lobby seats.”

St. Louis airport’s demise

While Columbia Regional is flying high, its big city neighbor to the east is taking a nosedive.

Lambert, which was the14th busiest U.S. airport in 2002, was ranked 31st this year, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The airport once provided direct service to over 100 cities, but the decline started soon after American Airlines took over from TWA in 2001. American, the primary airline at Lambert, made its first major cuts in flights in 2003. By next summer, American Airlines will have cut 46 flights out of the airport and eliminated 20 of its non-stop destinations, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This will leave the airport with 36 daily American flights going to only nine destinations.