Ready For Takeoff At Worcester Airport?
When the Massachusetts Port Authority went looking for a company to serve planes flying in and out of the high-demand Hanscom Field in Bedford, Andrew B. Davis said MassPort made sure it would seek a firm that would also develop and promote facilities at the Worcester Regional Airport.
Davis, director of the Worcester airport, said MassPort is committed to improving the airport, so it wanted to make sure companies included the lesser-used facility in their bids.
Richard Cawley, president and CEO of Rectrix Aviation, the Bedford-based firm that won the contract, said taking on the Worcester facility was nothing he had to be pushed into.
“It’s clearly equal in my view to what Bedford offers,” he said.
Both Davis and Cawley said they’re confident there’s a strong future for the Worcester airport, a future of runways busy with corporate jets, hobbyist flyers and commercial airlines.
Davis said the airport was designed to accommodate 500,000 passengers a year, and at its peak in the late 1990s it handled more than 350,000. Then, usage dropped off.
But in 2008, Direct Air began running a few regular passenger flights from Worcester. In 2011, Davis said, more than 100,000 Direct Air passengers went through the airport. That represented a 50-percent jump from the previous year, with increases in the numbers of flights and passengers on each plane.
Rectrix intends to push for the same sort of improvement when it comes to corporate jets and other kinds of flights.
$5M Investment In Hangar
Cawley said one of the most significant things his company is doing is establishing a maintenance facility in Worcester. He said corporations and other airplane owners are willing to travel anywhere in the country to have mechanical work done as long as they can find good service and reliability.
Rectrix is also putting up a $5 million, 27,000-square-foot aircraft hangar in Worcester. Cawley said the current hangars at the airport are smaller and can’t accommodate all planes. That makes the facility less than appealing to many corporate customers.
“You want that plane to be inside a hangar, maintained meticulously inside a hangar,” he said. “It’s like putting your brand new car in a garage.”
Cawley said another source of customers at the airport will be the overall growth in flights by companies in the region. He said some of that will come from more companies moving in around the Interstate 495 area, and some of it his company plans to generate by marketing.
He said he and a colleague plan to knock on the doors of both large and small companies.
“We say ‘this is us, we want to show you what we do,’” he said.
Potential In Charter Flights?
Cawley said there’s plenty of potential out there. For example, a small business that wants to send a number of employees on a trip to New York may not realize that a charter flight could be nearly as affordable as taking a commercial airline from Logan International Airport in Boston.
“They could leave in the morning and get back in time for Johnny’s Little League game,” he said.
Davis said the Worcester airport’s challenge has always been the fact that it’s located within a few hours’ drive of several other airports, but he also said demand for air travel is only increasing, and facilities like Logan and T.F. Green in Warwick, R.I., won’t be able to absorb it forever.
“At some point those airports are going to start getting busy and getting to capacity,” he said. “I think that’s what we’re positioning ourselves for… I’m confident it will happen. I can’t tell you when, but we’ll be here and ready for it.”
In the shorter term, Cawley said Rectrix plans to start construction in Worcester as soon as its lease is finalized and will begin hiring by the summer. The company has said it will hire 100 workers between the Worcester and Bedford locations. n
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