To Surcharge With Love
by February 19, 2001 12:00 am 99 views
Officials at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport came up with a unique financing plan to lure the five airlines at Fayetteville’s Drake Field to the new airport in Highfill in 1999.
They promised not to raise their rent over the amount being paid at Drake Field if the airlines would pay a $7.68 surcharge for each additional passenger beginning Jan. 1, 2000. In other words, rent wouldn’t go up unless the average number of enplanements increased.
“Basically,” Scott Van Laningham, staff director of the airport, said last year, “we told the airlines, We’ll protect you on the downside by charging you what it cost to operate from Drake Field. But we think you’re going to grow the market, and we want to share in that growth.”
The surcharge netted $331,174 for the airport in 2000 and is expected to bring in $407,854 this year (an increase of $76,680).
The surcharge is in addition to $789,291 per year the airlines pay in rent and fees.
Van Laningham said he didn’t know of any other airport that had used a similar formula to get airlines on board.
With the new financing plan in place, four of the five airlines at Drake Field moved to the new airport during the first quarter of 1999. The last holdout, U.S. Airways, moved to XNA in September of that year.
As a result, XNA had 329,216 enplanements in 1999. Airport officials had projected only 207,101 enplanements that year since all five airlines wouldn’t be relocated there until late in the year.
Enplanements for both XNA and Drake Field combined totaled 350,114 in 1999, an increase of 22 percent over 286,898 for both airports in 1998.
Van Laningham said the numbers indicate that more passengers are flying out of the regional airport instead of traveling to Tulsa and Little Rock to catch flights.