Until Thursday, Mike Hainsey hadn’t had a speaking engagement in about 18 months, so the Golden Triangle Regional Airport executive director had plenty to cover during his appearance at the Columbus Exchange Club luncheon at Lion Hills Center.

It’s been a tough year and a half for air travel, an industry hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in April 2020 when you could almost count the passengers who passed through GTRA on one hand — just 211. In 2020, GTRA’s traffic was down 70 percent from 2019, when the airport was booming with four daily flights to Atlanta through Delta Airlines.

Thursday, the outlook was considerably brighter.

“It’s nice to be able to talk about the good things that are happening,” Hainsey said.

His message: The airport is back in business, even if business isn’t back in the airport.

“As of right now, in the month of May, we’ve had just under 4,000 outgoing passengers to Atlanta, which means 8,000 round-trip on our three flights,” Hainsey said. “That’s a little less than 10 percent of what it was in May of 2019, and that was a record level with a 95-percent passenger load.”

What hasn’t come back yet, Hainsey noted, is business travel.

“As you’ve probably heard me say before, business travel is about 80 percent of our business,” Hainsey said. “That’s still not back and probably won’t be until the fall.”

In the meantime, GTRA has relied heavily on Columbus Air Force Base, which regularly uses the GTRA facilities for training.

“That represents about 70 percent of our traffic right now,” Hainsey said.

Hainsey said that traffic, along with $3.4 million in COVID relief funding, helped the airport weather the storm.

“Fortunately, we didn’t have to lay off anyone,” he said.

GTRA spent many of the lean months making improvements, with major paving projects on its ramps and runway, as well as improvements to its terminal. The airport will soon upgrade its runway lighting as well.

With those improvements, the increase in leisure travel and the anticipated return of business travel in the fall, the stage is set for a celebration.

“We have our 50th anniversary on Sept. 1, so we’re going to be rolling out a lot of things in advance of that, beginning June 1 with promotions, ticket giveaways and other things,” Hainsey said.

As for when the fourth daily flight to Atlanta will return, Hainsey said it’s difficult to predict.
“The major airlines got hit hard, $100 billion in debt for the three largest carriers, including $40 billion for Delta,” he said. “So they’re very cautious about adding flights right now. Any growth has to be a good deal for them.”

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].