FLUG REVUE May 2003: Fort Lauderdale airport expands nicely

FORT LAUDERDALE GROWS

By Andreas Spaeth

Arriving in Fort Lauderdale is quite an experience. Instead of the normal warning tone, Caribbean strains announce the imminent activation of the baggage claim belt in the terminal, while calypso music, the hoot of a ship's siren and other sounds typical of the region accompany one as one leaves the building.

One of the aims of the $655 million new building and modernisation programme just completed was to carry the aura of Florida, that sun-drenched holiday paradise in the south-east of the USA, right into the airport. And it has paid off: the entrance area of the spacious new Terminal 1 is adorned with genuine, dried palm trees. As one proceeds to the gates, one passes giant, flickering plasma screens carrying live transmissions of a reef with divers and sharks, along with spectacular shots of animals from the Everglades swamps. Workers are currently putting the final touches on the generous aquariums, in which genuine marine creatures will soon be swimming around.

Visitors to the freshly renovated Terminal 3 are greeted by a 100m long shopping mall that is a copy, right down to the paving stone look of the carpeting, of Las Olas Boulevard, a favourite shopping mall in the nearby centre of Fort Lauderdale. “We had to meet the challenge of steadily rising passenger numbers, and we wanted to turn Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International airport into a world-class airport that reflects the amenities and the atmosphere of Florida,” explains airport director Bill Sherry. “And we have succeeded, despite 11 September and all the changes in security that have been introduced since then.”

In these difficult times, Fort Lauderdale is an absolute exception among the US airports – it is continuing to grow, whereas all the others are sinking deeper and deeper into the red. In the first quarter of 2002 traffic was down by only 1.8 percent compared with the same period of the previous year. 2001 as a whole ended with the usual 3.5 percent growth in passenger numbers and with the airport having handled 16.4 million passengers. 2002 saw even stronger growth – almost a sensation in the industry – with passengers handled rising by 3.8 percent to 17.03 million. Whereas in every other airport in the USA the number of seats available in December 2002 had dropped sharply compared with the still untroubled days of December 2000, Fort Lauderdale was actually offering 1.4 percent more seat capacity. This astonishing trend Fort Lauderdale owes of course to its ideal location only 4km away from the second-largest harbour in the world for cruise liners, at Port Everglades, and only eight minutes' drive to the 40km long sandy Atlantic beach or ten minutes to the nearest golf course. Unlike Miami, 37km away, Fort Lauderdale has never been a major international hub but has concentrated on the lucrative domestic market. And, unlike overcrowded Miami, Fort Lauderdale is attracting airlines with its favourable charges: the average charge per passenger handled is a mere $5.03 compared with Miami's $14.66. Without the extra security requirements, Fort Lauderdale would actually have been collecting as little as $4.15 per head. Another of the attractions of southern Florida's second gateway is its passenger convenience – the walk from car park to departure gate takes barely five minutes. “We want to be a low-cost airport, as that is the main reason for the sustained growth we have enjoyed here,” said airport spokesman Jim Reynolds in an interview with FLUG REVUE.

And in fact, the secret of the success of Fort Lauderdale is the low-cost carriers, most of whose major trunk routes run down the East Coast corridor to Florida. In recent years they have all committed themselves to Fort Lauderdale – low ground handling charges exercise a magical attraction to airlines offering cheap air fares. Spirit Airlines moved its headquarters to the airport in Broward County as early as 1997, and today it is the fourth largest carrier in “FLL” (the three-letter code for the airport), accounting for just under 9 percent of passenger volume. A total of six no-frills airlines are engaged in enticing passengers to the Florida sun via this gateway – not just Spirit, but AirTran, ATA, Frontier, JetBlue and of course Southwest as well. In November 2002, i.e. in high season, they together accounted for about 35 percent of total passenger volume, another record in the US air transport business. Southwest, today the second-largest airline represented in Fort Lauderdale after Delta Air Lines, was the first to commence operations in the low-cost sector.

After that, the US economy took off in a big way. If the three airports in southern Florida (the third airport after FLL and Miami being West Palm Beach, 65km away) together grew by eleven percent during this period, closer examination reveals varying fortunes: over that period traffic fell in Miami by 7 percent but rose in West Palm Beach by 10 percent, while FLL meanwhile notched up a dazzling 73 percent growth. Particularly impressive is the performance of JetBlue, the most successful new start-up in the industry world-wide. Between the first six months of 2001, when it began operations in FLL, and the same period of 2002, the New York-based low-cost airline expanded its business here by 107 percent. “Today they offer 13 to 14 flights a day to JFK at one-way fares of $69 to $134, and they also fly twice a day to Washington Dulles,” explains airport spokesman Jim Reynolds. “In August 2002 their utilisation was 94%, and their average for the year was 83%.” The routes between the three New York airports and Fort Lauderdale are today the busiest market in the whole of the USA: at the beginning of 2002, an average of 9,313 passengers made the journey every day, followed by New York-Orlando (6,578) and the classic New York-Los Angeles (5731) market. Delta's new low-cost subsidiary, Song, is to operate from Fort Lauderdale right from the start.

Naturally the attractions of FLL as a destination are closely related to the economic strength of the region: the approximately 1.7 million inhabitants of Broward County are predominantly very affluent, and retail sales in the Fort Lauderdale/Boca Raton region are the highest in the whole of the USA. Even more important quantitatively, however, is the success of the cruise liner business. In 1980 150,000 landlubbers put out to sea from Port Everglades, at a time when the airport was handling six million passengers. By 2000 the balance had shifted to three million cruise passengers compared with 16 million air passengers, and seven million sea travellers and 32 million air travellers are expected in 2020. “By then we plan to have a monorail connection in service that will link the airport directly to the cruise liner terminal in Port Everglades,” says Jim Reynolds. The monorail will be part of a planned Intermodal Transportation Centre directly at the airport that will link air and sea traffic to the local and supraregional railway network. “That will significantly speed up the flow of traffic. At peak times, between seven and thirteen giant ships arrive every day in Port Everglades and set off again the same day. That's two lots of 20,000 people whom we have to accommodate,” says Jim Reynolds. Other planned expansion measures include a new terminal on the southern side which will boost the number of passenger gates, 57 at present, and lengthening of the southern runway from approx. 1,800m to 3,000m. Up to now the northern and cross-wind runways have handled the majority of movements, with the southern runway serving only General Aviation. Changing this state of affairs requires extensive construction work. Thus, the extension requires a 300m long bridge to be built. This project is expected to be completed by 2012.

The N-shaped layout of the runways dates back to the early days of the airport, which opened on 1 May 1929 on the site of a former nine-hole golf course as Merle Fogg Field. In 1940 the US Navy took over the airfield because of its proximity to the port and used it to train combat pilots for deployment on aircraft carriers. Up to 3,600 servicemen were stationed here at peak times. “The former American President, George Bush Senior, trained here at that time,” says Jim Reynolds. “Then, it was here that the Bermuda Triangle legend first came into being, when in December 1945 five aircraft disappeared without trace, along with 14 crew members after taking off from Fort Lauderdale.” Since 1953 the airport has been used solely for civil passenger and cargo traffic.

International business is less important to Fort Lauderdale than the domestic operations run by the low-cost airlines. In this sector, Miami, which is specified as destination in many bilateral air transport conventions and is still regarded by most South Americans as gateway to the USA, has an unassailable lead. Miami's hub function for American Airlines and its oneworld partners, United and the Star airlines makes it difficult for Fort Lauderdale, which is keen to establish its own international connections, to attract those carriers. The various Canadian carriers, such as Air Canada and its low-cost subsidiary, Tango, and Air Jamaica are of course exceptions, but otherwise international flights are thin on the ground. In 2002, the numbers of passengers bound for destinations beyond the US borders languished at a mere 1.2 million. After Condor scrapped its weekly service to Frankfurt in April 2002, Britannia, which concentrates on package tour passengers coming over to Florida for cruises, was the only European airline left. An 18-month long “guest appearance” from South African Airways, which introduced a refuelling stop here on its Johannesburg-Atlanta route, introduced a breath of cosmopolitanism. However, after 11 September 2001, passengers would no longer have been allowed to remain on board the aircraft, which would have made the stop too time-consuming, so now SAA makes an intermediate landing in Cape Verde.

Marketing director David Nelson's hopes are now pinned on Latin America. “South America is very important to us, as over the last ten years the population of South American origin in the Fort Lauderdale area has quadrupled. Our top priority is to commence services to Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia.” Already some success has been achieved here: the new Colombian carrier, Allianza Summa (formed from the merger of Avianca and Aces) has been offering a daily A320 service to Bogota since December 2002. This development could also raise the hitherto low proportion of transit traffic from two to four percent. “The Colombians like being able to fly on to other destinations from here with low-cost carriers,” Ed Nelson is pleased to observe. “We are looking for airlines which are not tied to Miami through alliances or else which, like Allianza Summa or Air Jamaica, are big enough to serve both airports.” The hot candidates include Copa Panama and Air France. Here, Nelson hopes that the policy of waiving the first year's landing fees for airlines that offer a new destination from Fort Lauderdale will serve as an incentive.

From FLUG REVUE 5/2003

Last updated 7 April 2003

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