Passenger numbers up at RIC as holiday begins

Thanksgiving holiday passenger traffic at Richmond International Airport is running strong so far despite the economic slowdown.

"We're trending ahead of Thanksgiving last year," airport spokesman Troy Bell said. "We're off to a pretty decent start."

Passengers getting on planes at RIC for five of the past six days were ahead of the same period a year ago, Bell said yesterday, though it is unlikely the airport will equal last year's passenger volume.

Thanksgiving is one of the year's boom times for travel. With about 120,000 Thanksgiving travelers at RIC, the holiday period accounts for about 3.5 percent of Richmond's 3.4 million annual passengers, Bell said.

But October's passenger traffic at the airport was down 4.3 percent from the same month a year ago, Bell reported yesterday, with 291,882 travelers using RIC last month compared with 305,103 in the same month in 2008.

Much of the larger-than-expected decrease was because of airline capacity reductions, he said. The airport is projecting that its annual traffic will be off 3 percent this year.

Only four years ago, passenger volumes such as those from October would have ranked it as the best single month in the airport's history, Bell noted.

Passengers are the economic underpinning for airports, and Richmond International's traffic is slowly recovering from its bottom in March, which was down 13.3 percent from the same month in 2008.

Year-to-date passenger numbers are down 5.4 percent from the same period of 2008. But since July 1, RIC's traffic is off only 2.4 percent, Capital Region Airport Commission figures show.

Five of the nine airlines serving Richmond showed traffic increases in October, Bell said: JetBlue Airways (up 17.9 percent), American Airlines (7.8 percent), US Airways (4.2 percent), United Airlines (3.5 percent), and Continental Airlines (3.5 percent).

Looking ahead to better times, the airport commission yesterday awarded a $5.1 million contract to Jack L. Massie Contractor Inc. of Williamsburg to expand RIC's parking lot.

Massie's bid came in more than 13 percent below the airport's engineering estimate for the cost of the work.

Massie will build 1,800 spaces and refurbish 700 existing spaces in the Economy Lot B across Airport Drive from RIC's passenger terminal, making it the airport's largest surface parking lot.

The lot expansion project should be completed in July.

That will bring to roughly 10,000 the number of parking spaces at the airport.

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or .