Future Flights of Fancy: Good to be King—By King Harris

I don’t know about you, but I’m not a great fan of flying, partially because of the language used by the airline industry, which includes macabre expressions like “terminal,” “final approach,” and “non-stop.”
Nonetheless, I am an advocate of our regional airport because simply put, success there means a stronger local economy. While other regional airports in California are suffering from permanent flight cancellations, the County Airport in San Luis Obispo seems to be bucking the trend.
Yes, while SLO currently offers flights only to SFO, LAX, and Phoenix, talks continue with Alaska Airlines and United Airlines for flights  in the future to Seattle and Denver respectively. But that’s not the major news, as we hear from Airport Director, Kevin Bumen.
“We have been very busy,” he said. “There are a number of things going on. We are submitting the application for the funding for a new terminal so that project is taking another step forward. We will be putting that out to bid this spring.
“The final decision to build or not to build has not been made yet. But we are getting all the pieces together and we’ll go back to the Board of Supervisors in June or July once we have more information on the grant in hand and then make a final decision to move forward at that point.”
Is it a question of money?  “It is,” he said. “Money and all the circumstances that surround the project in the industry. It’s a pretty dynamic industry by now, within the regional airports. We want to keep a close eye on that and make sure all of our assumptions we are making stay relevant.”
The project consultants, RS&H, “have submitted two separate designs,” he continued. “The board accepted one final design in August. One was very ambitious with a parking structure and multi-level terminal much more than what we’re proposing at this point. The design now is a single-level building just over 50,000 square feet, four gates, so that we could have four planes at once.
“Right now we have 12,000 s.f. “We have a single gate that we service three aircraft through at once. Of those 12,000 s.f., less than 9,000 of it is public space. That is so far below what a typical airport should handle. Our building is 45-years old. We’ve been through 9/11 in that facility and all of the security requirements that have been implemented since then, so we’ve used a significant amount of that floor space for security equipment.”
That building has seen a number of changes but it’s been expanded modestly but it’s a difficult building to expand. It was never built with that in mind. Right now we have airlines, airport offices, we have the sheriff’s office, TSA, and we have operations and maintenance in that building. We would move all of those functions into the new building. It’s on an entirely new site because the current facility sits too close to the runways. As we’ve grown over the years the aircraft have gotten bigger, the runway has gotten longer.”
I asked Bumen how he decides what he thinks he’ll need? “That’s the art of the science, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of analyses and looking back to what we had years ago in terms of type of aircraft, the number of people per flight, flights per hour, flights per day. There are a number of sources that look forward to forecasting for an airport of our size and our region that look at projected activity levels going forward.
“One of the interesting design studies that was done back in 1998 and revealed that we needed a terminal that was close to 30,000 s.f. when we were operating in the same building we’re in today. So we’re really going to be in a much more adequate facility that will have several options for expansion as we go forward. We can push the building in three different directions for the future so we’re going to design with the future in mind.”
There are a couple of other things to mention. The control tower will stay where it is, for at least several years. But the biggest change is going to become a reality within 6 months. Bumen said the turbo-props that have been flying here for decades will no longer be offering service by May of this year, so we know that our smallest aircraft seating 30 will be replaced by aircraft with 50 seats.
So the future is going to mean larger aircraft at the airport. One thing still up in the air because of this change is scheduling. Which means more people in the building at any one time, more baggage, more people per hour type of metrics.
If the new airport terminal is approved, and if construction is on time, we could see a new facility by the fall of 2016.