The longer road to success; Airport hopes extended runway will boost cargo, passenger traffic

The Chronicle-Herald
Business, Friday, May 6, 2011, p. C1

The longer road to success; Airport hopes extended runway will boost cargo, passenger traffic Cargo; Passenger Traffic Were Up Last Year At The Halifax Stanfield International Airport, But As
Business Editor Chris Lambie Reports, An Impending Runway Expansion Could Boost Traffic Even Higher

MAYBE SIZE DOES MATTER, at least when you're talking air cargo.

Halifax Stanfield International Airport cargo numbers were up 5.7 per cent in 2010, with about 28,450 tonnes of cargo moving through the facility last year, compared to 26,910 tonnes of goods in 2009.

But that number was off the airport's peak of 31,841 tonnes of cargo in 2004, despite the new Gateway Facilities ULC $15-million cargo complex that opened at the airport last June. It boasts the largest refrigerated space north of Miami with direct airside access.

"I tell you what's going to do the trick for us. It's going to be the combination . . . of that terrific facility and when we get the runway lengthened," Peter Spurway, a Halifax International Airport Authority spokesman, said Thursday.

"It's all part of the same package." Federal and provincial taxpayers will foot half the bill for a $28-million project to lengthen the airport's main runway to 3,200 metres from 2,682 metres. The authority will pay for the rest. "We have the money now," Spurway said. "We issued a $135-million bond last fall." The longer runway's slated to be done by the fall of 2013. "That means a fully loaded 747 can land and take off from here without issues, regardless of weather," Spurway said. Asiana Cargo Canada used to bring a Boeing 747 to Halifax once a week on a route from New York to Belgium but stopped two years ago because of safety and weather concerns.

The longer runway is expected to eliminate those fears. The airport is anticipating it will see a lot more cargo, mostly in the form of seafood, once the runway's done. "A lot of our seafood now gets trucked to Montreal and Boston and then flown overseas," Spurway said.

The new 40,000-square-foot cargo facility at the airport has 7,000 square feet of refrigerated space. "From a producer's viewpoint, the sooner we can get this (seafood) to markets in Europe . . . faster and fresher, then obviously they'll get better prices," Spurway said. "But, in some cases, behaviours need to change. This is what the guys at Gateway Facilities are marketing. That's what we're marketing.

But one of the key linchpins in this whole thing is that extended runway." Three daily US Airways flights between Halifax and Philadelphia drove transborder passenger traffic up at the Halifax airport by 7.3 per cent last year, with 369,767 passengers last year compared to 344,712 in 2009.

The non-stop flights to the major hub began last June. "People, certainly in our catchment area, have now caught on to 'I don't need to go to Toronto or Montreal to go through (U.S. customs) preclearance there; I can go through it here," Spurway said. "It opened back in 2006, but people's behaviour takes time to change." Domestic passenger numbers were up 2.8 per cent last year to 2,838,051. International traffic was down four per cent, falling to 300,335.

In 2010, overall passenger traffic increased by 2.7 per cent to 3,508,153 passengers, compared to 3,417,164 in 2009, making last year the secondbusiest year in the airport's 50-year history. "Our highest traffic number in absolute, all-time history was 3,578, 931 (passengers) in 2008," Spurway said. "It went up in '06, in '07, in '08, and then it slid in '09, in the economic downturn."</p>