How has Lancaster Airport become the third busiest airport in Pennsylvania?
-
Scott LaMar
Airdate: December 05, 2022
The third busiest airport in Pennsylvania is probably not the one you think. More than 97,000 planes departed and arrived from Lancaster Airport last year – almost 40,000 more than at Harrisburg International Airport and just about 11,000 fewer than at Pittsburgh International Airport.
On The Spark Monday, Lancaster Airport’s Director Ed Foster indicated the airport doesn’t have many commercial carriers arriving or departing, but they do have a lot of chartered and private planes and student pilots using the airport. The cancellations and delays at the major airports have helped Lancaster,”The cancellations that you see, they tend to be at the larger airports because they’re handling such a larger volume. But the major carriers are still not up to capacity from what they were pre-pandemic. The reports we’re hearing, over 500 major airline airplanes still parked because they don’t have flight crews for them. So they’re at capacity or beyond capacity on a daily basis. So there’s a lot of cancellations and rescheduling. So again, I think people are looking for opportunities to take flights both privately and from smaller airports because our airport, we don’t seem to get the the major influx and cancellations as the larger airports.
As a result, Foster said there are plans to grow Lancaster Airport,”We have an unmet need for corporate hangars. For corporate size aircraft as far as like a private jet for a company. And we also have unmet need for privately owned airplanes down to the smallest 2 to 4 seater single engine airplane. We’re in design phases now for both type designs for corporate and private planes. And even at the rate that we’re building, we can’t sustain the buildings that we need. We need more. So what we have done, we have actually reached out to some of the parties that are interested and created a very unique land lease plan with them to have a private investment where the company coming here may build their own hangar. And that’s become very attractive to a lot of them because they can control a lot more of what they get. Instead of just getting a square building, they can design it to fit their business model. So we’re building as fast as we can and as fast as we can get state funds. And it’s we can’t build as fast as we need, but we have a plan to build about 1 to 2 hangars a year for the foreseeable future to try to get to that need. Because we have about nine companies right now that will hangars here.”
