Leaders attempt to develop plan to bring commercial air service to Northeast Arkansas

Banker and former Arkansas Speaker of the House Davy Carter thinks commercial air service in Jonesboro could be a key to sustained economic growth in Northeast Arkansas.

Leadership at the Jonesboro Municipal Airport agrees. The airport is developing a new master plan and part of it involves a revitalization of the airport’s primary runway to allow commercial jets to land, Manager George Jackson told Talk Business & Politics.

“It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, but it’s not going to happen at all if we don’t try,” Jackson said.

The first step is to resurface the primary runway. At least 8-inches of asphalt will have to be added to the runway and taxiway, according to preliminary estimates. It will cost about $14 million, Jackson said. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gives airport’s in Jonesboro’s class $150,000 per year to make capital improvements. The money can be banked for five years, meaning it could have $750,000 to allocate toward the project.

“Obviously, that’s not even going to touch a project like this,” Jackson said.

If the runway can’t support aircraft that weigh 100,000 pounds or more landing, commercial air service isn’t an option, he said. The airport is in the process of collecting economic data so it can apply for other FAA grants. The data collection began at the first of the year, and it could take the rest of the year to complete, Jackson said.

Jonesboro has become an economic growth area in Arkansas during the last several years. The city enjoys a low 2.8% unemployment rate, and median household incomes have steadily increased to almost $42,000 per year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The city issued $186 million in building permits in 2016, a 23% jump from 2015, according to the city. Mayor Harold Perrin told Talk Business & Politics he thinks building permits could top $200 million in 2017. The city collected $17.326 million in sales taxes last year, a 4.43% increase. Sales tax numbers in January and February indicate more sales tax base expansion this year.

The growth prompted Carter, the regional president at Centennial Bank, to give Talk Business & Politics some ideas about how to continue the economic prosperity in the region during a Q&A for the media group’s State of the State magazine released earlier this year. Commercial flights to Dallas, Atlanta, and other major hubs could become a critical tool in development.

“I strongly believe that one of Jonesboro’s greatest infrastructure weaknesses is the lack of a commercial airport,” Carter said. “Companies in NEA are doing business across the country and globe and access to commercial flights is not only important to business, but also its employees who have to travel as part of their job.”

Air Choice One, a regional carrier, provides flights up to three times per day from Jonesboro to St. Louis. In 2016, the company had about 9,400 passengers, according to the company. Jonesboro doesn’t have a control tower, so it makes it more difficult to tally estimates of planes and passengers that come in and out of the airport. It costs about $35 to travel one way on the airline. A consistent complaint is that there is no service to Dallas. But several years ago a different regional airline offered service to Dallas, and the use wasn’t economically viable, he said. Air Choice One’s contract is up for renewal at the end of the year.

Delta, Southwest Airlines, and other major carriers would probably want the number of passengers between 10,000 to 15,000 per year before they would consider Jonesboro, he said. Major carriers haven’t released how many estimated passengers it would take, but Jackson said he’s spoken with several other airport managers and this is the estimate he has been given.

There are other obstacles as well. At one time Jonesboro’s airport was classified as a Part 139 by the FAA. This designation allows an airport to accept scheduled and unscheduled air carrier aircraft with more than 30 seats, and to serve scheduled aircraft with at least nine seats, but no more than 31 seats. To meet the requirements of the Part 139, an airport must have Transportation Security Administration, TSA, operations, and personnel in place, and have emergency response personnel and equipment available at the facility. This will make the project more costly, Jackson said. But, the airport has had these systems in place in the past, so he thinks it would work in the future.

Tentatively, airport officials are hopeful the runway work could be paid for and completed in the next five years, meaning commercial service could be a possibility in the next decade, Jackson said. To complete the master plan, an enormous amount of data still has to be collected, mapping and environmental studies still have to be completed, and meetings with the general public still have to be held.

“We know we have a long way to go, but this is a start,” he said.

ARKANSAS ENPLANEMENT HISTORY
Traffic out of Arkansas’ three largest commercial airports was up in 2016, with the largest increase seen in Northwest Arkansas.

Enplanements — or outbound passengers — at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) in Highfill, the second-largest airport in the state, totaled a record 669,487 last year, up 3.39% from the previous record of 647,530 enplanements in 2015. 2017 is also off to a strong start, with the airport reporting 46,287 enplanements in January, a 7.1% increase from January 2015 totals.

Despite staying below the 1 million mark for the second consecutive year, enplanements at the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock were up 0.42% to 996,897 last year. That’s compared to 992,712 enplanements in 2015. The last two years are the first two years since 1991 that enplanements at the state’s largest airport have been below 1 million.

Fort Smith Regional Airport enplanements were 87,488 in 2016, up only marginally compared to 86,704 enplanements in 2015. Fort Smith’s airport numbers are also off to a strong start in 2017, with 6,391 enplanements reported in January. That’s up from 5,500 enplanements in January 2016, an increase of 16.2%.