RIAC: Green air link to Ireland no flight of fancy

HIGHER PLANE: Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee and RIAC President and CEO Kelly Fredericks with Rose Hynes, chairwoman of the Shannon Airport Authority. / COURTESY R.I. COMMERCE CORPORATION
HIGHER PLANE: Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee and RIAC President and CEO Kelly Fredericks with Rose Hynes, chairwoman of the Shannon Airport Authority. / COURTESY R.I. COMMERCE CORPORATION

The verdant hills of Ireland are calling Rhode Island’s political and aviation leaders again.
In pursuit of nonstop flights from Warwick’s T.F. Green Airport to the Emerald Isle, R.I. Airport Corporation President and CEO Kelly Fredericks joined Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee’s recent European trade mission to pitch Irish officials on the Ocean State.
A direct air link between the two countries has been a longstanding goal of T.F. Green leaders and as recently as 2011 Fredericks’ predecessor Kevin Dillon mentioned courting Irish discount carrier Ryanair.
The goal of increasing connections between Ireland and New England appears mutual on the other side of the Atlantic, with two Irish airports actively seeking additional passenger and cargo business in the United States.
But with the airline industry still moving toward consolidation and fewer routes, Fredericks admits convincing airlines to make the investment in new routes to Green won’t be easy regardless of how much the airports want to make it happen.
So why does Fredericks think the time may finally be right to see Irish cities appear on the Green arrivals board?
“The demand is increasing, and we think we have a unique circumstance with Boston,” Fredericks said. “We are never going to beat Boston, but we will see passengers return because Logan does not have the ability to expand to meet future demand for both passengers and cargo.”
Unlike previous efforts to attract Irish flights to Green, the current talks do not focus on Dublin and are not limited to passenger service.
Fredericks visited officials from Shannon Airport and Ireland West Airport Knock, and is in discussions about cargo as well as passenger service.
Located on Ireland’s west coast, Shannon Airport is the country’s third largest by passenger volume and claims to have invented duty-free shopping in 1947.
Shannon, which already has regular direct passenger service to Boston, as well as New York, Newark, N.J., Philadelphia and Chicago, is open to increasing that network to include Providence, Fredericks said, but is even more actively looking at growing its cargo connections.
Shannon handles limited cargo now, but is adjacent to a deepwater port and wants to build a new air-cargo terminal and special economic zone to handle trade to North America and Asia, according to a presentation given to RIAC. “Shannon is looking at cargo first but is equally interested in passenger traffic,” Fredericks said. “They are becoming a global player in international cargo, and we think T.F. Green makes sense to be a gateway to North America.”
Like T.F. Green, Shannon once had more than 5 million annual passengers but has seen those numbers plunge in recent years to 1.4 million. Last year T.F Green had 3.8 million passengers.
Located in Ireland’s northwest corner, Ireland West Knock is considerably smaller than Shannon or Green, but its 665,000 passengers in 2013 represents significant growth since 2000, when it saw fewer than 200,000 travelers. Knock officials expect to break 700,000 passengers this year.
Starting in 2007, Knock had regular direct flights to Boston and New York through discount British carrier Flyglobespan, until that airline collapsed in 2009.
Now Knock leaders are looking to get that passenger connection to the U.S. back and are focusing on American tourists and the large Irish-American population in New England, according to a PowerPoint presentation forwarded by RIAC.
The presentation said Knock is having “ongoing discussions” about new routes with Aer Lingus, which flies to Boston from Dublin and Shannon, plus six other airlines without such a route: JetBlue, Delta, Southwest, Spirit, WestJet and Norwegian.
Fredericks said service between Green and Knock, if it does happen, could start with charter flights before advancing to regular scheduled flights.
Lengthening the T.F. Green runway, part of a $200 million project now underway and expected to be completed in 2017, will help make the airport more attractive to international carriers, but is not necessary for them to fly to Shannon or Knock, Fredericks said.
T.F. Green has been without regular international flights since Air Canada canceled its remaining routes to Rhode Island at the start of 2013, and gaining access to Europe would be a major victory for Fredericks’ campaign to build the airport back up.
Since the recession, however, the consolidating airline industry has not been focused on medium-sized airports like Green, and instead on expanding international networks through multicarrier partnerships and the largest hubs. At the same time, discount domestic carriers, such as Southwest, which built their networks through secondary airports, have found increased access to larger airports.
Robert Mann, an airline-industry analyst and consultant in New York, said only the 10 or so largest airports in the country are growing and airlines are increasingly looking overseas for profits.
“The primary area of growth for large network carriers is to balance and diversify their stagnant domestic markets through global networks into diverse economies, especially Latin American and Asia or high-revenue cities like London and Frankfurt,” Mann said. “Carriers are utilizing the ubiquity of their networks to get high-margin, large corporate-travel buyers with a single-store option.”
Like Green, Mann said other medium-sized eastern airports like Mac-Arthur Airport on Long Island also have been trying to attract Irish airlines like Ryanair and Aer Lingus without success.
To compete, smaller airports can lower their landing fees and other costs to airlines to lure them into new routes, but often that’s not enough for airlines to take the risk.
“The airport can make everything free – landing charges, passenger charges and even kick back money – but at the end of day the one taking the risk is the airline,” Mann said. “Jet fuel, marketing costs, hiring pilots, buying planes, that’s where the risk is. Airlines will be the arbiters of what’s viable, and there’s very little airports can do.”
For Rhode Island and Irish officials, the next step in trying to attract new air service will be a detailed exchange of financial information, Fredericks said. With Shannon specifically, the job is made easier by the two facilities sharing the same service-expansion consultant.
After the consultants crunch the numbers and talk to airlines over the next two months, Fredericks said he plans to reconvene with Shannon in a mid-July teleconference.
“I want to take all the data and plug it in and see what the business plans would look like so we can better define demand and find the appropriate carrier to meet that,” Fredericks said. “With the airlines we are always talking.” •

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