By ELENA MARSH
Staff Writer
A major commercial airline is interested in beginning service at the Moore County Airport, aviation consultants say, but local officials are yet to be convinced the service is worth the investment.
At a joint meeting last month, the county’s Board of Commissioners and Airport Authority board received a briefing on research toward potentially restarting passenger service locally. Commissioners, who have long been skeptical of using any public money to recruit or subsidize a carrier, remain so.
“The presentation looked good and the facts you’ve put out there are pretty,” said Commissioner Jim Von Canon. “But some of the facts feel like a best-case scenario of the world.”
The data, presented by Volaire Aviation Consulting managing partner Jack Penning, was based on an initial study on commercial service conducted last year for the county’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. That study concluded that Moore County travelers could fill 12 flights every day if 8 percent of the passengers who now typically fly in and out of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU) used local service.
“We have an average of 613 passengers each day who travel both to and from Moore County alone,” said Penning. “That’s 82 percent of the passengers who travel to and from Moore County fly out of RDU.”
However, Penning and the airport aren’t suggesting that extensive a plan. Instead, they want county commissioners to consider one flight daily on an aircraft akin to a 50-seat CRJ200 regional jet connecting with Washington Dulles International Airport.
Volaire’s study consisted of collecting information from airplane tickets that were purchased using credit cards linked to the region and referencing the ZIP code in each purchase in order to establish travel patterns. Volaire was also able to build data from credit cards of travelers who stay at hotels in Moore County.
“ When we look at these numbers — and I’ve worked in more than a hundred markets all over the country and other countries — we want to see a ratio at minimum of needing a third of our passengers or fewer to use our airport to make it successful. In this case, we need many fewer than a third of the passengers to make it work,” said Penning.
Washington is one of the top destination markets for the area. Of those passengers, 54.1 percent originate from the Moore County area, while 45.9 percent travel to the area. Airlines, Penning said, are often looking at a 50-50 split, since they seek to fill planes both ways.
“I think, when I came in to study this market, I truly expected that there would be a lot more inbound demand than outbound demand because you have probably the most famous golf resort in the entire world right here,” he said. “Instead, there are actually more people who live here flying out than people coming in.”
Consultants say the county has already received an offer for service from the “largest regional carrier in the country,” though they declined to name the airline. The inbound flight would be on a middle-of-the-day schedule, arriving locally between 11 a.m. and noon, and then turning around and flying back to Dulles.
Dulles boasts connections to more than 80 cities worldwide.
“ There are markets that you will be able to connect to that I don’t take into account,” said Penning. “You’ll be able to fly to Florida, too, with an hour-and-a- half connection or an hour connection.”
But headwinds in the airline industry persist, including pilot shortages, fewer carriers, and average per-passenger flying costs that continue to rise. Those issues have deterred most carriers from serving smaller airports.
“ I bring this up to say that, as an airport without current service, we are competing against every dot that is in jeopardy of losing its service for the aircrafting pilot time,” said Penning.
After World War II until the late 1960s, Piedmont Airlines operated commercial service at what was then called the Pinehurst-Southern Pines Airport. It returned in 1991 after merging with USAir, providing round trip service to Charlotte. Traffic peaked in 1998, with over 50,000 passengers arriving and departing from Moore County.
Delta Air Lines briefly returned passenger service in 2006 and 2007, but numbers barely breached 10 passengers per day each way. Delta ultimately pulled out, leaving the county to repay the company for subsidies it had offered.
Competition among smaller airports for commercial service means those subsidies still are a fact of doing business. The Moore County Airport could not legally provide that incentive, but it could be provided by another governmental agency like the CVB or Moore County. None of the minimum revenue guarantee could come from airport funding. Any agreement would likely revolve around a cost-per-flight segment. If the airline’s route is profitable over time, it’s possible no subsidy would be required.
“ As we get passenger behavior to change, all we’re doing is we are providing a cushion and a safety net for the carrier during that first two-year period where service is ramping up as we’re getting people to take the flight,” said Penning.
Still, any subsidy could still cost a few million dollars, and commissioners did not shy away from voicing their skepticism. Von Canon was arguably the one most concerned with the concept.
“ If I want to go to Denver, am I flying to Dulles and then into Denver and it’s all going to be one bill?” said Von Canon. “There’s just a lot of issues. It sounds good on paper and that (presentation) looked really good, but I can tell you that the people that will utilize (the service), they’ll be the rich and famous.”
Penning said that if Moore County can fill 35 seats on each 50-seat flight every day, it is estimated that a one-way ticket cost could be $150 on average. Right now, an average Moore County traveler pays $214 one way at Raleigh.
Commissioner John Ritter asked about the current capabilities of the airport and if the infrastructure is there to support commercial service. Adam Kiker, chair of the county’s Airport Authority, was confident that it can.
“The air side infrastructure of the airport is sufficient to support the type of aircraft we’re looking at,” said Kiker. “The runway’s long enough, and the approaches are sophisticated enough.
“If we transition to commercial service, the airport has access to infrastructure funding to help facilitate that transition. We’ve gone through this in detail, and we’re confident that the airport can execute the infrastructure needed to facilitate this.”
Any potential return for commercial service would require updating the small terminal on Aviation Drive. Work to update the structure is expected to begin next year. The architecture firm Alliiance is leading the effort.
An updated terminal will be larger than its current 15,000 square feet. The current terminal design is centered around general aviation, as opposed to commercial traffic.
Still, a $3 million minimum revenue guarantee was a sticking point that commissioners struggled to get behind.
“ Don’t get me wrong, I love our airport,” said Von Canon. “They do a great job. They’re a jewel out there of all the airports in North Carolina. … But, where is that $3 million funding coming from? What is your plan right now?”
“It’s not the airport’s intention to burden the taxpayers of Moore County with this,” Kiker said. “Our intention today is to make sure you are aware of the discussion and the data and the background, and to seek your feedback and guidance on the concept.”
Kiker said that there could hypothetically be a nonprofit or private entity that might want to put up funds for the minimum revenue guarantee, and that the airport and Volaire are working on studying those arrangements.
“ We actually had an initial contract to only study the market because we wanted to understand, ‘Is there even demand here?’” said Penning. “Only after we studied the market did we even offer an additional contract.
“We, to be quite frank, at Volaire don’t want to work on projects that we think are going to fail for the very reasons that you’ve pointed out. It reduces our success rate. Normally it takes two, three — even four years — to formalize the idea with the airlines to even get interest from an airline. We had interest after the first meeting from this carrier. I have not had that happen in 25 years. I had that happen one other time, and it was in Concord.”
Contact Elena Marsh at (910) 693-2484 or elena@thepilot.com.
