San Bernardino International Airport Offers incentive to passengers airlines... Press Enterprise September 24, 2009

BS Ranch Perspective:

Does the Inland Empire need another Passenger Airport? The answer is Yes! Capitalism demands it! the more the better! That is right, the more competition that is offered the better the flights prices in the area and the more that people that travel will benefit from the airport or airlines for that matter will do great having an extra out in the Inland Empire! Either that or there is not enough people in this area to sustain a full on full service Air Port such as the one that San Bernardino is trying to offer the people of the Inland Empire! 

BS Ranch

San Bernardino International Airport offers incentives to passenger airlines

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09:38 PM PDT on Thursday, September 24, 2009

By LOU HIRSH and KIMBERLY PIERCEALL
The Press-Enterprise

Looking to lure passenger carriers to a nearly completed passenger terminal, San Bernardino International Airport officials this week approved a long-discussed package of incentives, worth more than $2.5 million for each airline it can draw.

The incentives will be offered to up to four airlines that initiate commercial service. Officials during the past year have said that one major domestic airline is seriously examining the feasibility of starting service at the former Norton Air Force Base, while at least one more is considering it, though no carriers have been named.

The board of the joint-powers Inland Valley Development Agency, which oversees airport development, on Wednesday approved an incentive package that includes up to $1 million in revenue guarantees per year for the first two years of operation, and forgiveness of landing fees for five years.

It also provides for $500,000 in advertising and marketing funds, to help each airline promote its new services during the first year of operations.

"These amounts won't nearly pay all of the costs that an airline would bear to extend service, but it could make the difference in turning a profit on that service," said Don Rogers, interim director of the development agency.

Rogers said it costs an airline between $70 million and $85 million to bring new services to any airport.

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Terry Pierson / The Press-Enterprise

The San Bernardino International Airport's new commuter terminal is nearly complete. Now the airport is moving to attract airlines.

He said money is already in the airport's budget to cover the incentives for the first two airlines that agree to start service, and funding for the other two will need to be finalized later by airport authorities.

Airport aviation director Bill Ingraham said the incentives will be offered only to airlines that can guarantee a minimum of 12 weekly departures.

Officials have said for several months that some kind of incentive package will likely be needed to attract carriers to the San Bernardino airport, in an economy where most airlines are cutting rather than adding services. "What we're doing here is formalizing that," Ingraham said.

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Terry Pierson / The Press-Enterprise

San Bernardino International says one airline is considering landing at the airport and another might be interested.

Carriers have dropped flights over the past several months at facilities across the nation, including Ontario International Airport.

Ontario airport doesn't offer any incentives to new airlines, and the cost for doing business there is $14.50 for each passenger who gets on a plane, one of the highest in Southern California.

The Ontario airport's revenue relies on its airlines. As revenue has dropped and fewer airlines serve the airport, landing fees have risen to $2.76 per 1,000 pounds, and terminal rental rates have increased.

The San Bernardino facility's current landing fee is $1 per 1,000 pounds.

Thomas Nolan, aviation director at Palm Springs International Airport, said his airport offers incentives to new airlines on a case-by-case basis.

San Bernardino airport officials have said the main passenger terminal, which cost more than $80 million to renovate from its former military base use over the past two years, will be ready to accept commercial flights before year's end. Still being completed are final tarmac and parking lot improvements, as well as food and newsstand concessions.

Reach Lou Hirsh at 951-368-9559 or lhirsh@PE.com.

Reach Kimberly Pierceall at 951-368-9552 or kpierceall@PE.com.

What's offfered

San Bernardino International Airport officials this week approved measures to help encourage major airlines to add local service. Incentives would go to each of the first four airlines that bring in new flights.

Revenue guarantees: Up to $1 million per year for first two years.

Advertising and marketing funds: $500,000 during first year.

Landing fees: Forgiveness of payments for five years.

Source: Inland Valley Development Agency

Rialto Airport Closure Leaves Workers With Sense of Loss (San Bernardino Sun Friday Oct. 5, 2007)

BS Ranch Perspective

 

Rialto's Municipal Airport has history within the City that will be sorely  missed, those days that we had Drag Races at the Airport, the Run Whatcha Brung Started at the Airport and I remember one of them that I went to where the City was crying that they were low on money and they didn't have the resources for Security, they held the whole Event at the Airport with no Problems!!

 

That was the last year that they had the Drag Races, because the Federal Aviation Administration took over as the Manager of the Airport and they were the ones that said that the Airport was not going to be closed for anything except being an airport!!

 

The Go Carts Races that were out there for every month some times twice a month and those go carts could almost hit speeds of forty miles per hour on the speedway, straight away!!

 

There has been many things that have been at the airport that have gone by the wayside. for many years there was a Coffee Shoppe where lots of people would gather for Breakfast and Lunch, but it closed for dinner, it was a great Place for Lunch, and Breakfast, The last owner was the best she was one of the friendliest girls, and well she ran a nice place. it was a great business. I met my wife and quit going there as she worked at a competing Restaurant.

 

Now that is all in the past, all the Helicopter Students that learned to fly from Japan, and China that came over to the USA and learned to Fly, But when the Economy Changed just a little the Schools in Rialto Closed ,but not all of them, there was some Helicopter Schools there and Art Schall Aviation Flight School was still working as far as I knew, and Art, was instrumental at keeping a great deal of businesses at the Rialto Airport!!

 

BS Ranch

 

 

Rialto Airport Closure Leaves Workers With Sense of Loss

Posted on: Friday, 5 October 2007, 15:00 CDT

By Andrew Silva, San Bernardino County Sun, Calif.

Oct. 3--RIALTO, Calif. -- Perhaps the silence is the most telling, and the most sad.

On a typical weekday, the happy purr of an airplane engine only occasionally drifts across the wide expanse of Rialto Municipal Airport.

Small airports are often like small towns. Everybody knows everybody. Folks help each other out, work together, party together.

"We're all like a big family," said 61-year-old Manuel "Manny" Lucero, who's been painting airplanes at the airport since 1969.

"You see a hangar door open, it's like a welcome sign," airport Director Rich Scanlan said.

That's all changed since an act of Congress put the venerable Rialto airfield on the path to closure to make way for a sprawling new development dubbed Renaissance Rialto, designed to bolster the working-class city's image and economy.

"The airport is dead now -- has been ever since it sold," Lucero lamented, sitting in his plain office next to the hangar where he's made his living for nearly four decades.

Gone are the weekend barbecues, the impromptu get-togethers, the joyful camaraderie. The airport caf, a central gathering place, closed some years ago and is a poignant reminder of better days.

"It's just like somebody pulling my heart out," said.

News of the impending closure spread through the aviation community nationally and has nearly killed his business, even though it's unclear when the airport will actually close.

A Piper Cherokee Lance sits outside, ready for paint, the first job he's had since November.

Lucero's reputation was such that he once painted a DC-7 for Howard Hughes, employed 17 people and comfortably put his two kids through college.

"The guy said if I do a good job (on the Piper) I'll have 100 airplanes, until the bulldozers pull up in front of my shop," he said.

The Rialto field is going the way of many general aviation airports, done in by skyrocketing land values and officials with dollar signs in their eyes looking to kick-start their community's economy.

All that flat, open acreage is worth far more with offices, shops and homes than it is with any number of Cessnas and Pipers.

"Rialto is a perfect example of competing interests," said Bill Dunn, vice president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. "It was a tremendous asset that was underutilized until a developer came along. Unfortunately, officials look at dollars instead of long-term transportation needs. This is driven by greed."

Rialto's airport is in line to follow other local airfields into oblivion.

Morrow Field in Colton, just north of Valley Boulevard between Pepper and Riverside avenues, and Tri-City Airport, roughly along today's Hospitality Lane in San Bernardino, closed ages ago.

Airports available for public use dropped from 6,437 in 1975 to 5,008 in 2001, according to data compiled by the pilots association.

The Rialto airport was born in 1945 when Sam Miro was passing through town and bought 80 acres of scrubland for $18,000, according to historian John Anthony Adams.

He and his five sons spent a year clearing brush and moving rocks to create a usable runway. He lived on a little house at the airport until his death in the 1970s.

Ironically, the project that sounded the death knell for the airfield -- the extension of the 210 Freeway through Rialto -- years ago triggered a battle between Rialto and Fontana over the airport, which back then was in an unincorporated county area.

People for decades thought the Foothill Freeway, as today's new 210 has long been called, was coming through any time, bringing with it a gold rush of development and growth.

"The thought was that with aviation really hitting its stride in the '60s, an airport adjacent to the freeway would induce corporations to locate here to have access to both the airport and the freeway," said Scanlan.

Fontana made a run at annexing the airport, the airport director said, but Rialto got it in 1966.

It's still home to the impressive air force operated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which patrols the largest county in the Lower 48, and Mercy Air, the helicopter ambulance service.

Its most famous tenant was Art Scholl, one of the greatest stunt pilots in aviation history who crashed in the Pacific Ocean in 1985 while working on the film "Top Gun." Art Scholl Aviation continues to operate under the direction of his wife.

As recently as the early 1990s, the airport was still seen as a potential economic boon, if it could capture some of the overflow business from Ontario International Airport.

But then Norton Air Force Base shut down in 1994 and the focus turned to transforming a regional economic body blow back into an economic engine, a process that is just now building a good head of steam after more than a decade of effort.

"I don't think anyone had a crystal ball that in a couple of years (after 1992) this massive Air Force base would be transformed," Scanlan said. "The likelihood of Rialto competing with Norton wasn't very good."

Now the Rialto airport's remaining tenants are awaiting word from the developers on whether they'll be moving to the former air base, now San Bernardino International Airport, or maybe Redlands or Upland or Riverside.

Westpac Restorations Inc., which restores classic aircraft, is already packing up for Colorado.

The housing market crash now has the timeline more uncertain than ever, as the city and developers wrestle to decide what Renaissance Rialto will ultimately look like.

Since 1969, Bill Gerth, 73, has had a hangar at the Rialto airport where he parks his award-winning 1956 Piper Apache Geronimo. He estimates he's logged at least a half-million miles in the plane, flying all over the country with his wife and kids.

"We used to have hangar parties, barbecues, tell our stories, have our kids here," he said.

Stacks of photos in one of the drawers in his cluttered hangar show smiling friends clustered in chairs or standing with drinks near the barbecue and the airplanes.

When he learned of the closure, his reaction was "gross depression."

The social scene is gone. Friends have passed. The kids have grown. But the memories will endure.

-----

To see more of the San Bernardino County Sun, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sbsun.com.

Copyright (c) 2007, San Bernardino County Sun, Calif.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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Source: San Bernardino County Sun