GSP plans expansion, renovations

By Charles Sowell  

JULY 22, 2010 7:11 a.m. (0)

Work could begin as early as late spring or early summer 2011 on an $80 million to $100 million renovation and expansion of the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, officials said this week.

As plans stand now phase one of the work could be done by sometime in 2012.

The planned work is part of an effort to bring what is essentially a 1960s building into the 21^st Century, said Dave Edwards, airport executive director.

Estimates on cost, at this point, are preliminary, Edwards said.

“We hope to have a better handle on what this will cost after the design work is done. It ought to be considerably less than the estimates at this point.”

The renovations and expansion would be paid for through a combination of federal grants and airport surplus funds.

“We don’t anticipate taking on any additional debt at this point,” Edwards said.

Much of the work will deal with infrastructure – heating, cooling, lighting and water usage, said Larry Holcombe, airport manager.

“We hope to be able to cut our power consumption by 70 percent and will install systems to capture rainwater for use in flushing toilets and irrigation.”

The early work will involve delving into the guts of the building, Holcombe said. GSP was built in the early 1960s and a major renovation was done in the 1980s.

“So you see that the newest parts of the building are more than 20 years old now,” Holcombe said. The oldest are pushing 50 years of constant usage.

Passenger convenience will also be greatly enhanced, Holcombe said. Five new gates are planned bringing the total number to 18. There will be a central security checkpoint and food services will be moved to behind the security check in.

Also the two concourses at the airport will be connected eliminating the need for passengers to go back through security in order to go from Concourse A to Concourse B. Currently the airport has about 620,000 passengers boarding planes yearly, Holcombe said.

At its peak in 1995 GSP served about 900,000 boarding passengers a year,  Holcombe said, and the improvements at the airport are primarily designed to serve them.

Broadly speaking, GSP has about the same numbers of passengers leaving flights as getting on, Holcombe said. The deplaning passengers don’t linger at the airport.

“Mostly they just get their bags and go on,” he said.

It takes about 30 minutes to get through security as things stand now, Holcombe said, and the airlines want passengers to be in the boarding area at least 30 minutes before scheduled takeoff so the actual time from ticket counter to a chair at the boarding gate is about an hour.

That wait could be eased a bit by centralizing the security checkpoint and adding lines and security employees, Holcombe said.

The 620,000 figure is expected to increase to 1.2 million in the coming years as Southwest Air starts service at GSP and the airport stops leaking so many passengers to Charlotte and Atlanta, said Edwards.

Those passengers now are diverting to the larger neighboring airports in search of lower fares, Edwards said. Estimates on total passenger usage (enplaning and deplaning) are expected to grow to the 2 million range.

“The rule of thumb is 1.4 passenger enplanings for every person in your service area,” Edwards said. “We’ve got about a million people in the area so we should be well over a million now.”

Once Southwest Air starts its estimated five additional flights a day out of GSP the hemorrhaging to Charlotte and Atlanta should ease, Edwards said.

“There will always be that 10 to 15 percent who travel to Atlanta, or Charlotte, for the convenience of taking a non-stop flight,” Edwards said.

Long primarily a business use airport, passenger demographics are changing at GSP, Holcombe said. The split is 60 percent business to 40 percent leisure travelers; which is an increase on the leisure side.

The addition of Southwest should help bring up the leisure traveler side of the ratio, he said.

Also in the works are plans for safety enhancements for the northbound lanes of Interstate 85 at the airport, Holcombe said.

The airport paid about $1.4 million for 11 acres several years ago to do away with the current almost circular onramp for northhound I-85, Edwards said, and recently was reimbursed for the purchase by the FAA.

“We did it so that when SCDOT is ready to put in improvements the land would be available,” Holcombe said. “A lot of the surrounding property is being taken up with business and industrial properties and we wanted to have the land paid for when the highway folks are ready.”

There is no timeline for work on the onramp.

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