(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music swells) - The Metropolitan Airport Authority of Peoria, or MAAP, owns and operates two airports, Peoria International and Mount Hawley.

A lot has changed in our flying options in the 75 years since MAAP was formed.

Gene Olson joins us.

He is the Director of Airports for MAAP, and a lot of that growth has come under your watch.

Congratulations for that.

- Yeah, thank you.

- Before we get to the specifics on MAAP, and we wanna talk about the history of the airport, since it's top of mind with a lot of people, I have to ask you about the federal government shutdown.

Has that affected Peoria International Airport yet?

- It has not affected us yet.

The TSA passenger screeners and the air traffic controllers are both federal employees.

One works for DHS, the other works for FAA, and they've both been deemed essential workers, you know, based on safety.

So they are required to work, even though they're not getting paid.

So they've been showing up for work, they've been doing what they're supposed to do, and we have not seen even any glitches.

I mean, I suppose you could get to a point where if not enough of them show up for work, you could see a slowdown.

But so far that hasn't happened.

And actually, I was talking with the TSA screening manager and their attendance is actually a little better than average right now.

- Okay.

- So hats off to those people, because they're working without pay.

- Yeah.

- Everybody anticipates that when the budget bill is finally passed, that it will include back pay for them, but the longer this goes on, the more of a hardship it is for those folks.

- Oh, absolutely.

And have you noticed, forget the government shutdown, we've heard about staffing shortages nationwide with just trying to get air traffic controllers, because it's a difficult job, a stressful job.

- Yeah.

- [Mark] Have you had any of those issues?

- From my understanding, the tower is a little bit short-staffed, but it has not impacted operations.

They're able to do what they need to do.

I don't know the specifics, since that's a federal agency, and they don't actually work for me, but it's my understanding, they're able to do workarounds and keep the operation going.

- All right, good.

Well, let's hope that it comes to a conclusion soon.

And speaking of towers, we're gonna talk about a new tower you all are building, in just a little bit, but first, I was very interested, in doing research on this, discovering that the Peoria Park District used to run the airport.

- That's right.

The airport at its current location started in about 1932.

And it was originally a private organization that started on just a very small patch of land.

Then after about, I don't know, five or six years, it kind of got to be more than what they could handle, so they turned it over to the Park District.

Park District ran it from, I think 1937 until 1950.

And that's not unique in Illinois.

Today, there are actually a couple of airports that are run by park districts.

Decatur comes to mind, and Canton comes to mind.

There's probably more that I'm not thinking of, but it's not unusual, and it is a thing that is in the state's enabling legislation for park districts, so.

The Airport Authority was created, and I guess it took a while to get that going and get the legislation passed, but the Airport Authority was created and took over in 1950.

- [Mark] Okay.

- And so we're, we're kind of a purpose-built organization that all we do is run airports.

And, you know, the Park District, no aspersions against them, but an airport would've been one of the many things that they do.

- [Mark] Sure.

- And I'm actually a former Peoria Park District employee.

I was a lifeguard in their pool system back in the '70s.

- I don't know if I want any lifeguards running the airport.

(Gene laughs) I'm just kidding.

But that's gotta be, you know, they don't, obviously you're not gonna have aviation experts back then working for the Park District.

So I mean, I'm sure that was, they did the best they could, but not an ideal situation.

- I'm sure they would've had a professional airport staff and manager and so on.

But again, it would've been, the airport manager back then would've had people to report to.

Whereas in our case, now, you know, I report to a board and that board is tasked solely with operating airports.

- Okay.

Now with the way MAAP is run, is it run as more of a, is it supposed to be a money-making operation?

Is it something that's here for the public's greater use?

You know, what is the mission there?

- Well, we're a bit of a strange bird because we're a governmental body, our official classification is a municipal corporation.

So we have a lot of the powers and responsibilities that a small city would have.

And so we're essentially a governmental body, but we're expected to run like a business.

So we don't necessarily try for a profit, we try more for break-even.

And we're trying to provide services at the same time, you know, in a very efficient way.

A lot of people don't really understand what we do as an airport authority, and they think that, you know, that we're responsible for the airlines and for air traffic control and for TSA.

The best way to think of those is as our tenants.

So I compare us frequently to a shopping mall.

When you go to the mall, you usually don't deal with the people who own the mall, you usually deal with their tenants, the sporting goods store, the department store, the specialty shops.

And so when you come to the airport, you don't usually deal with us.

You deal with our tenants, the airlines, and so on.

The exception would be if you own your own airplane and you lease a hanger from us.

So those people we do work directly with.

- Sure.

How big of an economic engine is it for an area like ours to have an airport as big and as good as ours?

- Well, there's a couple things I could say to that.

The first is that if you look at PIA, the number of people who work on that facility, on airport property, is 2,000 people.

Probably a little bit more than that.

Now, I'm counting the International Guard and the Army National Guard in that number.

And then by contrast, the number that work for me, for the Airport Authority, is 36.

So we do a lot with a little.

But if all of our, if all the employment on the airport was with one employer, we would be the fifth largest employer in Peoria County.

Obviously we're not, you know, because they work for trucking companies and logistics companies, and the Army and the Air National Guard, different corporations that have aircraft at the airport.

And then the airlines, TSA, FAA, there's a bunch of different employ, you know, Byerly Aviation, which is what we call the fixed-base operator, or FBO.

There's the Bradley Flying Association is a very active flight school.

And I think they used to maybe be affiliated with Bradley University, but they're not anymore.

So it's a big, a big economic generator.

The other aspect of economic impact for us, if you look at, you go talk to a economic development site selector, and you ask them, "Okay, why did you put your factory or your facility in this location?"

They may or may not refer to an airport in that decision.

But if you flip that coin on its other side and you ask, "Why didn't you put your facility in this location?"

The lack of an airport will always show up in the top 10.

So that's really what the airport does, in terms of economic impact for the region, is it provides access to the world.

You can get on a plane in Peoria, and by the end of the day, you could be almost anywhere in the world.

And it provides that kind of direct access, which is vital for, you know, in today's connected world, it's vital for economic development.

- With airports outside of Chicago, you know, we've got a ton nearby, Bloomington-Normal, Decatur, Springfield, how do you compete with those airports in terms of, you know, what do you have to do to get a passenger to go through your airport as opposed to those other ones?

- The biggest thing that a passenger's gonna look at is availability.

You know, can I get on a plane at this airport and get where I need to go?

And then they're gonna look at fares.

How expensive is it to fly from this airport versus a different airport?

And, you know, so what we have to do is we have to work with the airlines to try to get that service in Peoria.

We don't get to decide where they go.

When I talk to service clubs, I have a little slide that shows a red line connecting Peoria and Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

And if we got to decide where they go, that's where we'd have a flight, because that's where I like to go.

But we don't get to make that decision.

The process involves us talking to the airlines and presenting business cases to them, saying, "Look, we've done all this research, and if you fly from Peoria to X, Y, Z airport, you'll make a lot of money."

And then they'll look at it, and a lot of times they've already looked at it, and they have numbers.

Like, we get numbers six months behind, so by the time the numbers get published and make it through the filtering process, and we can tap into them, it's six months.

The airlines have the numbers today and in the future, because they know who's already bought a reservation on a flight that's going in the future.

- [Mark] Sure.

- So, so they have all that data, but what they don't know is, for example, the county where Fort Myers, Florida, is, there are so many people from Peoria who own property in that county, that their Chamber of Commerce has a Peoria Day.

- [Mark] Really?

- Or at least they used to.

So we took that information and went to Allegiant Airlines and we said, "Look, there's all this demand for going to that section of Florida."

Now, Allegiant doesn't serve Fort Myers, but they serve Punta Gorda right up the road.

And so we were able to take that kind of demographic information that they didn't have, and present it to them.

And eventually, it still took some time, but eventually they connected Peoria and Punta Gorda with a flight, which is doing very well, and they're very happy with it.

And so that's, that's a healthy thing that we help the airline get going.

- What's your most popular route?

- Gosh, number one city is probably Las Vegas.

And it's not just people running out there to gamble, there's a lot of trade shows out there, there's a mine expo that goes on out there, and if you look, we have direct flights on Allegiant to get to Vegas, but if you look at the average daily passengers, it's more than the number of Allegiant seats that go to Las Vegas.

So people are flying on the legacy airlines, which by that, we mean United and American, they're flying those airlines to get to Vegas as well.

- What destination is on your wishlist?

- Hmm.

Aside from Rhinelander, no.

(both chuckling) We are always looking at different things that we think are gonna help improve service.

And I don't know that I can say a specific destination, but one of the things that is kind of high on our wishlist is if you look at our reach to the East Coast, it's pretty good.

You can get to the East Coast by O'Hare, by Charlotte, by Dallas, even.

And what we're kind of lacking is a western gateway.

And that's where we worked with United to reestablish the Denver flights.

They had them a long time ago, I think they started in 2007 or '08, and ran for a number of years.

But then they pulled that kind of as part of a restructuring within their own network, and we'd been pushing to get them back to Denver for a long time.

Well, we just in March of this year, got those flights reestablished, and that's a great western gateway.

There's a lot of demand to Denver, but Denver is a connecting hub, so it really opens up the West Coast.

So I would say another West Coast destination, and other things that connect to international services is high on our list.

- I was always curious why there's nothing going directly to the northeast, New York, Philadelphia, Boston.

- Yeah, we looked at that and we would love to see that.

The problem is that the New York and northeastern airports are all overcrowded.

So when you talk to an airline about flying into Newark or LaGuardia, or any of those places, they're already packed full.

So what you're asking them to do is to take, you know, our market isn't big enough to fly a 737 every day to those places, so what you're asking them to do is take a 737 out of a slot and put in a 76-seater, which they don't really want to do that, because they'd rather fill that with a bigger airplane.

- Sure.

- So that's the challenge there.

It's not out of the cards forever.

And especially with, you know, we'll talk about history probably in a little bit, with deregulation, it's really easy for new entrants to come into the market.

So you might see a popup airline that wants to do that, but it's the capacity issue of those airports.

You can still get there, you can go to O'Hare and fly over.

You can go to Charlotte and fly up.

Those are all, you know, that's the beauty of connecting flights, is that once you go to the hub, you can go just about anywhere.

- Sure.

Let's talk about a little bit of the history of the airport, because when it started off, you know, very small obviously, and it's grown exponentially.

- Yeah.

- How do you attribute that growth?

- Well, some of it is technology and time.

I mean, the airport started with four shale runways.

And when I started here at Peoria, we had a shuttle driver who was a longtime employee of Byerly, and he remembered the shale runways, he'd been here back then.

But as technology changes, you know, we have a historical photograph in our entrance hallway of a Stinson Tri-Motor sitting on the pad, the rest of the airfield was grass and shale, and there was one paved pad in front of the terminal building for the airplanes to park on.

And that was a Stinson Tri-Motor.

I mean, Stinson isn't even in business anymore.

And some people might have heard of Ford Tri-Motors.

That was a high-wing, they called it the Tin Goose because it was made out of corrugated aluminum.

And I think the cruise speed on those was maybe 70 miles-an-hour.

(both chuckling) - Wow.

- And that's what, that's how American basically built out their system.

There used to be a transcontinental route where you would fly during the day and then at night they would land and they'd put you on a train to another airport, and then you would get on that airplane and fly during the next day.

And now, you know, hopping from coast to coast is a matter of hours in a jet.

So as the technology improved with aircraft, then, you know, the facility improved and the offerings improved.

Back in the 1950s, we would have maybe 30 to 50,000 passengers a year for the whole year.

And now, if we have a month that's under 60,000 passengers, that's kind of a lackluster month.

- Sure.

So what are you looking at for a whole year?

What's, like, last year, what did you have?

- We were, we were very close, I think our record was 689,000 passengers, and last year we had 687,000.

So that's still on that recovery path from COVID.

Like I said, we're running about 20% ahead.

I don't wanna pick a number, 'cause I, you know, I don't want to jinx us, but I think we are gonna break a record this year.

- With all the growing that the airport's done, tell me a little bit about some of the growing pains that y'all may have had, in terms of, you know, again, getting airlines in here, making sure planes are on time, having enough staff, things like that.

What have you seen over the years?

- Well, I'd say one of the biggest challenges has been regulation.

If you go back to the late seventies, that was during the period of the Civil Aeronautics Board.

So there was a government body, that if an airline wanted to serve two communities, you had to go to the CAB and get approval from them.

And in the late seventies, we had Continental Airlines back then, and they had, the understanding I have, is they had like five proposals for route service from Peoria to different cities that were in front of the Civil Aeronautics Board that never got ruled on.

The CAB just never issued a ruling to say yes or no.

They were so kind of bureaucratically backlogged.

And then in 1978, the Airline Deregulation Act was passed, which Peoria was a big proponent of that, because we'd had the issues with the Civil Aeronautics Board and we wanted to see Peoria grow.

So that removed the barrier so anybody could enter or leave markets and airline service.

And so we anticipated a boom.

And there was a boomlet.

So, in '78 there was a spike in our activity.

And I jokingly say, but it's not really a joke, that everybody with a Piper Twin started flying an airline and it just took a year for them to go out of business, which really is kind of what happened.

(chuckles) - [Mark] Sure.

- And then what nobody anticipated was the creation of the hub-and-spoke system.

So that's where, instead of flying, like I remember as a high school kid flying from Peoria to Jacksonville, Florida, where my brother was in the Navy, and we flew Peoria-Chicago, Chicago-Atlanta, Atlanta-Jacksonville.

Then on the way back, and my dad was an airplane nut too, so he had bought this on purpose, we went Jacksonville, Atlanta, St.

Louis, and then, I'm not sure, I think it was Jacksonville, Illinois and Decatur, Illinois, we stopped at both places before landing in Peoria.

- Oh, wow.

- And that was the Civil Aeronautics Board.

They ran airline service like it was rail service with stops in between.

The good side of that, was it connected lots of little communities.

The bad side of it was, it was not economically sustainable.

So the hub-and-spoke system changed all that, so that you fly to Chicago and then you fly to where you really want to go, because you can consolidate all those flights and operate them more economically.

What that meant for Peoria was a big decline in air service.

So that peak we saw in '78, it went away within two years and then we kind of bounced along at lower passenger numbers.

That really started reversing itself in about '85.

And then in '97, we really kind of started on the trajectory that we're on now.

With a big acceleration, you know, after about 2010.

- It's interesting to look at some of the old airline maps, where they go, like the Ozark Airlines, I looked at some of the small towns that they would land in, and I was just shocked that that could happen.

- Yeah.

- Let's talk about the future a little bit.

I guess the big thing on the horizon is the new control tower.

Can you give us an update on that?

- Sure.

The existing control tower opened in 1959, and that was actually one of the Airport Authority's biggest projects.

The terminal used to be on Airport Road, which is why it's called Airport Road, and then they moved it from there to a new site, which is where the terminal is today.

And that opened in 1959.

So that building served as both a tower and a terminal from 1959 to 2011.

The building is in terrible shape.

It's got structural issues, it's got asbestos.

The demolition costs that we've got estimated, there's over $2 million worth of asbestos removal in there, which is about a sixth of the total cost.

I used to joke that we wanted to sell raffle tickets for who got to push the plunger, but we are not gonna be able to do that, 'cause we'll have to take it apart carefully so that that doesn't become a hazard.

- Yeah.

- So we started working on the new tower in, well, it was really actually even in 2008 before I got here.

But that's been sort of on the back burner or the front burner at different times, ever since I got here in 2009.

We did a design, in 2013 we started, and then in, you know, we couldn't get the funding for construction for a long time.

And then finally we were able to get the construction, so that building is under construction now.

Phase one is the base building, the flat part, that should be done next May.

And then the tall part is the control tower itself, that should start next May, and go to probably the following May or June.

And then we'll have to operate them in parallel for a while and make sure that the new one works before we tear the old one down.

- Good idea.

We only have a few minutes left.

Let's talk about, besides the control tower, which is obviously a big deal, how do you see the future of the airport in terms of size, expansion, passengers?

Put on your hat and your crystal ball, and tell us what we might see in the future.

- We're blessed with a 10,000-foot runway and our second runway is 8,000 feet, we've got good instrument approaches.

So I think on the air side, we're in pretty good shape.

I think where we're gonna have to do some development is in landside facilities to accommodate passenger growth.

So we have the new terminal, we built the international building, which was really dual-purpose, it's both domestic and international.

And in the future, we may have to put another satellite facility on the other side.

Parking is a big issue.

We're gonna be building, in the next year, a remote lot that will shuttle people back and forth to, it'll be across from CEFCU, and that will give us enough capacity to tear down a building that's in the parking lot and then add more there, and maybe one day down the line, a parking deck.

But those are so expensive, that that may be, you know, the determining factor on whether we do that or not.

- Sure.

Well, you wanna get that tower up and running and, you know, get that put to bed, so you finally have the brand-new facility for those hardworking traffic controllers to work in.

Well, Gene, we appreciate it.

We're glad to see that we have this option in central Illinois, because, you know, without it, people drive into those bigger towns, and now they can just hopefully get up and have a five- or 10-minute drive to the airport.

- And the best part is when they come home, it's a five- or 10-minute drive home.

(chuckles) - Exactly.

Exactly.

Well, Gene Olson is the Director of Airports for MAAP, the Metropolitan Airport Authority of Peoria, which is 75 years old this year.

Gene, thanks for coming in.

We appreciate it.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

(bright upbeat music) - All right.

Well, thank you for joining us.

You can watch this segment again at wtvp.org, and you can check us out anytime on Facebook and Instagram.

Have a good night.

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