(YXS President John Gibson discusses the airport's performance Wednesday evening.  Photo 250 News)

Prince George, B.C. – The tenth anniversary year of the Prince George Airport Authority assuming control of the airport from the federal government was marked by numbers in the black, both in financial and passenger terms, but also with an understanding that more has to be done to get the message out about YXS.

At the authority’s Annual Public Meeting Wednesday evening, President and CEO John Gibson noted that the Prince George airport followed a global trend toward relatively minor increases in air traffic in 2013.  On a worldwide basis traffic grew at about 3.9 percent.  The North American increase was 1.1%, Vancouver 2.1% and Prince George 2%.  “So we haven’t seen the boom up here yet”, says Gibson, “but we’ve got nice steady growth.”

Gibson says “the global air cargo traffic that we really key an eye on because of our cargo tech-stop program was pretty well flat year over year and the Asia-Pacific traffic in that region which we particularly look at was flat as well.”  Gibson says “the Canadian dollar has a big impact on us in its relationship to the U.S. dollar because we tend to compete with American airports for cargo tech stop traffic.”

Passenger traffic at YXS went up 2% in 2013, with 426,709 passengers compared to 418,589 in 2012.  Last year’s figure is a record for the airport, and Gibson says “it certainly is a great bounce back from 2009 when our traffic bottomed out from the last five or ten years.”

Air Canada brought in two 400s to Prince George which provided another 23% more seats starting in May.  Westjet provided 5% more seats and Central Mountain Air added more seats when it introduced its Calgary service in June.  Gibson says “although our traffic grew conservatively at 2%, our seats were a terrific driver as our revenue went up more significantly.”

On the money side of things, 2013 revenue of $6.5 million was up just about a million dollars from 2012.  Operating revenues totaled $6,491,385 last year compared to $5,498,840 the year before.  Operating expenses were also up, to $5,734,583 in 2013 compared to $5,088,185 in 2012.  The result for 2013 was an operating surplus of $756,802.  It was the fourth year running that the airport operated in the black.

Gibson says the airport tried to keep capital expenditures down pretty tight last year, spending about $700,000 “which, for an infrastructure like ours, is pretty minimal.”

However, despite positive gains Gibson says “we’ve got to get out and tell the story to our partners, the City of Prince George, the Regional District, Prince George Chamber, Northern Development Initiative Trust, Initiatives Prince George.  Very important, though, is the federal government.  The federal government, when I came five years ago, didn’t really understand our story her in Prince George, what we were trying to do.  I think we’ve made great inroads in getting the awareness of our cargo tech stop program, how they can help us.”

So what is happening with the tech stop business at the airport?  It had been stated in 2012 that once the fuel farm was established everything would be in place to service tech stops.  Gibson says “some of the hurdles we had, higher-priced fuel, we had Anchorage and Fairbanks, the common fuel storage facility was completed pretty well a year later than we thought.  According to NavCanada our fuel is competitive with Anchorage.”

On the question of cargo business Gibson says “there’s two kinds of cargo pieces there’s the normal cargo that comes and goes, on Purolator and Jazz, that’s been pretty steady.  The big traffic that everybody looks at in big airplanes isn’t going to happen until we get a cost structure that makes sense or enough cargo business out of Northern B.C. to support exports.”  He says the airport authority is working closely with IPG and has some interesting projects “that we’re not able to talk about but probably two or three years in development.  So if we’re going to look at pushing more cargo out, we’re probably two or three years more away.” 

Gibson says the number one complaint at the airport is that “we do not have good parking lot access from the level part of the parking lot up to the next level.”  An architect was hired to come up with options and they are all prohibitive in terms of cost.  A covered ramp with the proper slope came in at about $4 million, an elevator from the bottom level to the top is $1.5 million and a tunnel going under the road to the terminal where it would connect to an elevator would be about $4 million.  Gibson says the air carriers asked the airport authority to seek out support in the form of grant money but he adds “nothing out there really puts a dent in those costs, so we returned to them the end of last month and they suggested we try to tie down the costs a little bit tighter.”