Published: Sunday, June 3, 2007
Contrasting success
By ED RUNYAN
In 20 years, the fortunes of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport and the Akron-Canton Airport have gone in opposite directions.
Passengers at Youngstown-Warren have dropped from 140,000 in 1986 to 26,000 last year. At Akron-Canton, passengers increased from a half million in 1986 to more than 1.4 million last year.
One local aviation expert says the dismal numbers at Youngstown are a reflection of economic forces dating back nearly 30 years, to the time when many of Youngstown's steel mills closed.
Time and fortunes could change, say other airline industry insiders, if Youngstown can bring the type of air service that business travelers will use.
The airport has achieved some success in the past year with the introduction of the low-cost leisure airline Allegiant Air last May and hopes to build on that success.
Tyri Squyres, Allegiant's director of corporate communications, called Youngstown-Warren a "good market for us," saying Allegiant sold 23,000 tickets here during its first year. The cost of the tickets was 20 percent below the price charged by other airlines at competing airports, she said.
The results the first year were good enough to continue the service — but not good enough to justify adding service to Las Vegas yet, she said.
Ticket sales in Youngstown-Warren were a little below average for the markets that Allegiant opened last spring, she said. The airline will suspend flights again this fall, from Aug. 6 through Nov. 9, during the typical tourism slowdown season, she said. Some stronger markets are having shorter suspensions or no suspension, she added.
Fred Krum has worked for the Akron-Canton Airport, meanwhile, for 31 years. Perhaps the worst of those years was 1981, just after he became airport director. That was the year deregulation of the airline industry took hold.
Krum remembers the phone calls from United Airlines about once per month for a while.
"We're dropping Atlanta. We're dropping Tampa," United told him, and the list went on.
"After 1981, [smaller] airports like ours started to tank," Krum said.
Deregulation took away the financial motive for airlines like United to fly to airports like Akron and Youngstown, Krum said. Deregulation eliminated the Civil Aeronautics Board, the federal agency that dictated that specific airlines provide service to certain airports at certain prices.
Now, the airlines could fly to any city that made economic sense.
In markets like Akron and Youngstown, where planes frequently left the runway with very few passengers on board, it no longer made sense to continue service, Krum said.
The marketplace was a confusing one for many years, Krum said, and it only got worse from 1992 through 1995. It was during this downturn that Krum realized he needed to change his airport's strategy.
"We looked at the business. We said we can't be the UCLA airport: Upper Canton, Lower Akron. We said we've got to be player in all of Northeast Ohio. How do we do that?"
The answer was a low-fare air carrier.
Krum and his staff set out to entice AirTran Airways to start up service in Akron-Canton, and in 1996, it happened. Eleven years later, AirTran is one of the largest low-fare airlines in the U.S. and the key to Akron-Canton's success, accounting for 60 percent of the 90 flights coming and going each day.
What made AirTran special was that it offered fares of $69 each way, which were a big hit with travelers.
"If you offer them a good product, they will drive," Krum said, explaining that visitors to the airport generally come from as much as an hour away from the airport — the cities of Akron, Canton, Mansfield, New Philadelphia, Youngstown and Cleveland. The market contains about 4.2 million residents.
In the past 11 years, the airport has been called one of the fastest-growing airports in the nation.
From the airport, passengers can fly to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, Orlando, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. The airport's success led to $29 million worth of gate and concourse improvements, completed last October, and $60 million since 2001.
Krum believes one key to Akron-Canton's success has been marketing.
Akron-Canton Airport spends 20 percent of its operating revenue on marketing the airlines to its customers, said Kristie Van Auken, the airport's director of marketing and communications, who got on board in 1996.
"That's unprecedented in the industry," she said, adding that most airports spend between 5 percent and 10 percent.
"We are a marketing organization, not a facility with airplanes," said Van Auken.
Van Auken said the airport has the "perfect niche" of low prices and lower stress than bigger airports.
Mahoning Valley officials, meanwhile, faced even more daunting obstacles during the post-deregulation years.
Pat Ungaro, the current Liberty Township administrator, had been mayor of Youngstown for two years in 1986 and had battled a dizzying number of challenges:
*Organized crime.
*50,000 steel jobs lost in Youngstown.
*A defective Lake Milton Dam.
*The city-owned airport in Vienna, then known as Youngstown Municipal Airport, was losing money every year since 1981.
Ungaro's answer to the Lake Milton problem was to let the water out. That led to the state's taking over the lake and turning it into a state park.
His answer to the airport was similar.
"I sent a letter saying that on Dec. 31, we were shutting it down," Ungaro said. "It shouldn't be Youngstown subsidizing the airport. We didn't have the money."
He even offered to give the airport away, he said.
It took six years, but eventually the airport was taken over by a two-county board called the Western Reserve Port Authority in 1992.
"Youngstown would have been bankrupt a hundred times if we would have kept it," Ungaro said.
Former U.S. Air pilot Chuck Johnson, who was hired to market the airport to airlines in 2005, said he thinks the harm done to the Youngstown airport during the transition from Youngstown Municipal Airport to a regional airport has had lingering effects.
City officials like Ungaro and others before him were not airport experts, Johnson said. When deregulation hit, they were caught unaware and didn't know how to respond.
From his observation, he said, Akron was different.
"They aggressively fought for their turf," Johnson said, and that made the difference.
Youngstown didn't lose commercial air service all at once, airport officials said. Over the years, the airport has provided flights by airlines such as Northwest Airlink and USAirways Express.
But Steve Bowser, the current airport director, and Johnson agree that the product offered there has not been well received.
"It was a case of the wrong product," Johnson said.
Bowser, who became director in 2003, said most of the commercial air service offered in Youngstown since deregulation was on a type of aircraft called turbo-prop that was considered inferior by passengers, or required a layover at the Akron-Canton Airport. At other times, the airlines were too unreliable for business travelers to use, often canceling flights.
The airport is hoping a new grant effort will offer new chances.
They've filed an application to the U.S. Department of Transportation for a Small Community Air Service Development Program grant of $800,000. The grant aims to attract a regional airline that would fly 50-seat jets three to five times per day to a regional hub, such as Charlotte, Chicago, Columbus or Cincinnati.
"We would be able to support that," Bowser said, meaning the community would buy enough tickets to keep it running.
Bowser and Johnson say offering service to a hub would allow business travelers to go wherever they need in the world. They would use the service if it utilized jet aircraft, and the service would help the area's economy by giving business executives a reason to stay in the Mahoning Valley.
Bowser said he expects to hear in June or July whether the grant has been awarded.
Congressman Tim Ryan of Niles, D-17th, said getting the grant approved is one of his priorities.
Darryl Jenkins of Virginia, an industry analyst and a longtime aviation economics professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., says a community with the population surrounding the Youngstown-Warren airport seems like it would be attractive to a regional airline.
Jenkins said the best way to attract such a carrier is to give evidence the community financially supports bringing the airline to town. In most cases this involves direct financial investment and incentives, such as reduced-price fuel. If the airport is successful in attaining the $800,000 grant, that would also help, he said.
Roger Cohen, president of the Washington D.C.-based Regional Airline Association, a trade association that represents 44 regional airlines, said the area's congressmen and U.S. senators need to keep watch during hearings on the Federal Aviation Administration's budget and should contact airlines personally to encourage them to enter the Youngstown-Warren market.
"Legislators should pick up the phone and call. Everybody likes to be asked to the dance," said Cohen, a Cleveland native. He encourages local officials to be creative: "Put your thinking caps on and ask for the business."
Cohen said he would not try to guess the potential for the Youngstown airport to be successful in landing an airline, but said regional airlines have thrived since deregulation and taken over much of the market in smaller communities.
Of 600 airports in the United States with commercial service, 442 have only regional airlines, he said.
"Deregulation has shown that airlines will try to grow a market," Cohen said. "Communities that never thought they'd attract an airline have done so."
There are smaller communities with airports not far away from Youngstown that have found a solution in a different type of FAA assistance, called an Essential Air Services grant.
Terry Moore, airport manager at the Parkersburg, W.Va., Regional Airport near the Ohio River, said his airport joined with the airports in Huntington, W.Va., and Clarksburg, W.Va., to get service from their airports to Pittsburgh International Airport from Colgan Air Inc.
Parkersburg, which is about two hours from Columbus and three hours from Pittsburgh, gets three direct flights per day from the service.
The Parkersburg airport's service area — a circle extending about 45 minutes away from the airport — contains about 150,000 people, Moore said. The airport had about 12,400 passengers in 2006, or about half as many as the Youngstown airport. Moore said that Parkersburg lost four companies and around 4,000 jobs in the past four years, resulting in fewer business travelers in the region.
Bowser said Youngstown doesn't qualify for an Essential Air Services grant because of its proximity to the airports at Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Reid Dulberger, executive vice president of the Regional Chamber, said the Youngstown-Warren airport does provide a service to the community that the Akron-Canton airport does not give its community: a military base.
Without the airport, there would be no Youngstown Air Reserve Station, which employs 1,500 to 2,000 people and brings around $100 million into the local economy, he said.
runyan@vindy.com
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