Officials plan trip to England to size up interest
By BY MICHAEL RANDALL
January 09, 2008 *--6:00 AM*
STEWART AIRPORT — In its ongoing quest for more airlines, Stewart International Airport is looking to the east.
No, not the Far East. Eastward to the United Kingdom.
William
DeCota, the Port Authority's aviation director, and Diannae Ehler,
general manager of Stewart, will fly there next month to meet with
officials of various airlines. It's a trip DeCota makes regularly, but
this time the focus will be on Stewart, which the Port Authority began
running Nov. 1.
And one of the things they'll
try to get a handle on is what, if any, interest airlines over there
might have in setting up regular passenger service between Europe and
Stewart.
If the overseas flights happen, it
would not be the first regularly scheduled international passenger
service at Stewart, though it would be the first to go beyond the
Western Hemisphere.
United Express launched a
daily flight to Toronto aboard 30-seat planes in September 1992. They
later cut back to 19-seat planes but still found themselves unable to
fill enough seats each day, and the service was dropped after six
months.
Charter flights to Cancun, Mexico, also flew out of Stewart for a time in the early 1990s.
Ehler said yesterday that she and DeCota will be promoting the Hudson Valley while they're overseas.
"We do think there's a potential market on both sides" of the Atlantic Ocean, Ehler said.
Flights
to even a few European cities would open up the possibility for
travelers out of Stewart to book connecting flights to other
destinations.
But Ehler said the trip also
will provide other insights — including the need to expand Stewart's
terminal, or build a second one, in the future. The terminal is
designed to accommodate about 1.5 million travelers a year. Stewart
recorded about 900,000 last year, triple the passenger volume in 2006.
So
if, for example, they were to learn an airline in Great Britain is
interested in starting service in three or four months, Ehler said, "I
want to be able to talk about how quickly I could accommodate that
need."
Regardless of whether the European
flights materialize, if the Port Authority comes through on its vow to
bring more airlines to Stewart, eventually more terminal space would be
needed. Ehler said she hopes to have a design for a "modest expansion"
of the terminal by the end of the year
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