BIA’s Future> Officials search for solutions to rural airport problems

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BANGOR — In the airline business, it’s commonly accepted that success breeds success. But Bob Ziegelaar, director of Bangor International Airport, also knows that failure can breed failure in this volatile industry.

For a manager who makes covering every angle an obsession, the unexpected announcement of the departure of Delta Air Lines connected like a one-two combination from Mike Tyson. For the first time in decades, Ziegelaar was unprepared to deal with a twofold crisis: BIA’s primary airline was gone, and the lack of forewarning had left him without a plan to put a positive spin on it.

Privately, those close to Ziegelaar said the airport manager, normally cool-headed, anguished over the Delta announcement. There were feelings of betrayal. Ziegelaar’s relationship with Delta went back more than 20 years and had evolved to a point where the airline practically owned BIA in terms of customer loyalty.

“They left Bob holding the bag,” said one airport employee.

Rather than play up the advantages Comair’s fleet of smaller jets would bring to the region, Ziegelaar was forced to spend most of this year on the defensive. The fact that the 50-seat Comair fleet was composed of swift and comfortable regional jets was obscured by two fairly obvious observations: They didn’t have “Delta” embossed on their tails, and they were smaller than the 139-passenger Delta jets.

“This has had a lingering effect on this community,” said Chris Hall of Stafford Associates, which recently completed an $11,000 marketing study for BIA. “I do have the perception from what I hear in the community that there is still a lot of regret that there are no big jets, and that’s mostly from people who have never tried Comair.”

People in the region are going to have to come to grips with the reality that bigger is probably gone forever. They also must accept that bigger is not necessarily better when evaluating the level of comfort offered by state-of-the-art regional jets that are rolling — albeit slowly — out of the factories today, say observers such as Hall and Ziegelaar.

“We won’t dismiss the potential for traditional service coming back, such as a Delta or American 727, but it would have to be a pretty unique situation under current market conditions,” admitted Ziegelaar.

Plugging the leak

Greater than the threat of reduced service to BIA’s market area is the exodus of the 120,000 potential customers who are flying out of other airports, largely because of cheaper fares and bigger planes. Hall identified the figure as 33 percent of BIA’s theoretical market, which includes the 480,000 people living in Penobscot, Piscataquis, Washington, Hancock, Aroostook, Waldo, Somerset and Kennebec counties.

Ziegelaar and BIA officials know their first priority is to plug that leak.

“For the business traveler and for the individual or the couple, it’s important that travel agents and the media point out the difference, for example, in parking fees and that paying $15 a day at Manchester [N.H.] can quickly add an extra $100 in costs to that trip,” Hall said.

The stakes are high.

“There has to be loyalty developed at Bangor, and sometimes developing that loyalty results in inconvenience,” said Kevin Dillon, manager at Manchester Airport. “If folks want to keep air service at Bangor, they’ll have to realize that maybe they shouldn’t take that trip down to Logan or make that direct flight and maybe settle for two stops to get to their destination.”

To that end, consultant Hall is recommending the following steps for BIA:

A. Attract a quality, southbound regional jet carrier for three or four flights per day to Washington or Philadelphia with excellent connections to the Carolinas and Florida.

B. Attract a low-fare airline for low-frequency, nonstop service to Florida or to a hub offering continuing low-fare service to the South.

C. Attract westbound service to Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland.

“If all three of those services came into Bangor, filling those jets at reasonable, economic load factors would require generating an extra 125 passengers a day,” Hall said. “We also think those nonstop services would take passengers from Portland and attract others from New Brunswick.”

Regional jets

Key to Bangor’s resurgence will be expansion of the regional jet industry — a segment that shows great potential for operators of all air terminals, but one that now is fraught with complicating factors not the least of which are “scope clauses.”

Members of pilots unions are paid more to fly 150-passenger-plus aircraft. They wonder whether airlines would flood the market with regional jets simply as a mechanism to improve earnings by reducing the need for big-jet pilots and their bigger salaries. Scope clauses protect those jobs at many airlines by restricting the number of regional jets that can add to a fleet annually.

Companies that build regional jets have responded to that development by limiting the number of jets they build each year.

Added to that problem is the fact there is now a nationwide shortage of pilots themselves.

All of the airport managers in Maine and New Hampshire perceive the current problem in obtaining regional jet service to be temporary. It is, they say, one that will resolve itself relatively soon for the simple reason that air transportation is customer-driven and that such labor disputes help no one.

“The RJs continue to be the aircraft that the airlines are turning to for the foreseeable future because they can operate them economically and get a decent return,” said Dillon. “I don’t think it’s a flawed strategy to look at that because that’s the trend in the industry. The scope clause is a big issue, but I think you’re going to see it taken on fairly strongly by a lot of the airlines who are going to continue to push that envelope pretty far with the unions.”

Other efforts to help BIA continue. U.S. Rep. John Baldacci, D-Maine, convened a House subcommittee on rural air service hearing in Bangor on Monday to scrutinize the implications of airline service decisions on the commerce of smaller communities. During the meeting members of Congress scrutinized BIA’s decline in passenger traffic and pledged to find remedies for ailing small airports across the country.

Sen. Susan M. Collins, R-Maine was seated as an honorary member on the committee. She said she strongly favors an approach that could tilt existing FAA policy in Bangor’s favor by tweaking the criteria used in awarding new boarding slots to major airlines.

Collins, who recently sponsored legislation requiring a study of the effects of deregulation on small airports, said she does not want to turn back the clock on deregulation. Instead, she proposed granting requests for additional slots at hub airports to airlines that agree to schedule flights out of underserved areas like Bangor and Presque Isle. She said the provision would not necessarily force an airline into a money-losing proposition.

“The point is not so much that they can’t turn a profit in Presque Isle or Bangor, but that they would be able to fly from a larger city where they can earn even more money,” she said. “….part of the obligation that airlines have is that, if they’re going to be awarded these additional slots, they need to take care of some of the underserved areas. They can still make a profit — they just might not be making quite as much.”

Fair competition

Baldacci said he will concentrate on ensuring the competitive process in the airline marketplace. Baldacci, who sits on the House Transportation Committee, said situations exist where larger carriers may be pricing out the newer carriers who are trying to establish new markets.

“We need to be sure that that isn’t happening,” he said. “If you deregulate competition you want to make sure that it’s not unfair competition. It would be like an oil company that controlled everything that would put its prices down so low it would drive out the competition and that put it prices right back up again after the competition disappears. We suspect that has been happening with airlines.”

Meanwhile, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Collins are calling for congressional studies on the impact deregulation has had on small, rural airports. All three members of the delegation have made their feelings about Delta’s pullout and the departure of Continental Express known to top officials of both companies.

During a recent breakfast meeting of concerned Bangor business representatives, Mayor Baldacci emphasized the efforts under way at the state level with Gov. Angus King’s BIA Task Force.

Most of the proposals are time-worn and expensive, and no one is holding their breath in Augusta expecting the state to endorse them. The ambitious plans — all of which could increase air traffic to BIA — include::

An east-west state highway through Bangor connecting New Brunswick to New Hampshire and Quebec.

The restoration of passenger rail service from Brewer to Calais with a spur down to Trenton for access to Acadia National Park.

The infusion of massive state capital to construct new tourism facilities at Moosehead Lake and the Squaw Mountain Ski Area.

A new air link with New Brunswick, a route that has been tried in the past but has never turned a profit.

A proposal being floated by local business executives involves having companies and large institutions such as the University of Maine buy large blocks of seats as a means of guaranteeing jet service. Those discussions are still in the rudimentary stage and will likely fail if the buyers provide the airlines with overly optimistic data concerning passenger potentials, predict airline analysts.

After all the international and national forces have been sorted out, the debate over BIA’s future may in fact still revolve around questions that were being asked 30 years ago when the facility was conceived: What kind of investment will the movers and shakers in Bangor’s business community make in the terminal? How much effort is being expended by the city to attract large employers to Bangor? In order to give airlines a reason to fly into BIA, who will build the facilities to handle the passengers? Is there any hope for a new major inn complex on the waterfront, so that large expositions or conventions can be easily be routed to Bangor?

“I’m not sure I can answer those questions at this point,” said Bangor Mayor Joseph Baldacci.