Q&A: RI Airport Corporation CEO Shares Hopes for Smoother Skies Ahead

Photograph courtesy of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation.

When Iftikhar Ahmad arrived in 2016 to take his post as CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation — a position that oversees five regional airports in addition to the newly christened Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport — he knew he faced an uphill battle. Green’s main competitor in the region is Boston’s Logan International Airport, a contest Ahmad compares to going up against a “goliath.” Still, no one could have predicted the tumult that would follow. In 2019, after several high-profile incidents, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Boeing 737 Max, the plane that was supposed to carry Rhode Island’s aspirations for new international flights on its Norwegian-branded wings. A year later, the pandemic grounded nearly everyone else.

This year, Ahmad’s tenure in Rhode Island has taken a decidedly more optimistic turn as travelers return in force and startup Breeze Airways settles into its new base of operations at T.F. Green. We sat down with Ahmad to discuss the pandemic recovery, future flight prospects and what to expect from the summer travel season.

How is T.F. Green recovering from the pandemic and other challenges of the last few years?

Our airport, the six airports, have about a $2.6 billion [annual] economic impact. There are about 20,000 jobs that are associated with this business. I think that it’s important to note that there are about 7.5 million people in the ninety-minute drive time of PVD. Our basic competitor is Logan. And Logan is in a bigger city with more population and more businesses over there. They take about 90 percent of that market of about 44 million passengers. And out of those 44 million, we get about 4 million passengers. So it’s about a ten-ninety split. What we are trying to do — and COVID hit and really impacted us — is to increase our footprint and get a better market share. In the beginning, we got really successful with Norwegian starting here [in 2017]. There were several other airlines that came too, and some of them are still here, but Norwegian got hit by the 737 Max [grounding], and that issue really impacted them. Then COVID hit, but here are the results: I started in 2016 with seven airlines and seventeen nonstops. Seven airlines were going to seventeen different cities from here. Today, we have ten airlines, and they’re going to about thirty cities. What has changed here is coming out of COVID, we have gained some strength and in July and August, we will be close to 2019 seat [levels].

When you say seats, is that the number of passengers?

No, seats come first. When you go to buy a seat, the seat has to be there, so what airlines do is they schedule seats in coming months. They put that in the schedule, you go to Expedia or Google Flights or any of these airline websites, and then you buy one of those seats. We know about how many seats are coming in the next few months. We count those seats and we compare them with 2019 on a monthly basis and in July and August, we are about on par with the 2019 numbers. The reason I’m mentioning it is coming out of COVID, we are getting back to our 2019 strength steadily.

In March, Breeze Airways opened a new base of operations at Green. What does that mean for the airport?

The agreement with the state is that they’ll do twenty or more new destinations out of Providence. They’re going to put seven planes here. That’s a base, when your crew is based somewhere and aircraft are at that airport at night. These seven aircraft will go back and forth from this city to other places. Rhode Islanders, they can come from Cranston or Providence or Westerly and on a nonstop basis, they will be able to go to Europe, Los Angeles or San Francisco, or the Caribbean. This is a significant improvement of service and connection that will impact your readers and our neighbors, but it will also help businesses in two different ways: If you can fly on a good price that cuts time out of travel, your travel budget goes down to do the same business that you were doing last year. And secondly, more people will come from more cities. What that does [is] it fills your restaurants, it fills up your hotels, and all the services associated with us or a business, they will all flourish because there is more money coming into the community.

One thing that I think is important to note is that while we have been very successful, there is supply and there is demand. It is very important that the supply is there, and that’s what we’re doing: We’re creating supply. But what the airport cannot do is create demand. Why am I bringing that up? Because there are about forty-five other states in the United States that are spending an average of $23 million to let people know about their state. Visit Michigan, visit California, visit New Orleans, right? There are local, city-based, state-based organizations, public organizations that spend funds and money on bringing people there. We have to point that out to people about Rhode Island. Rhode Island, unfortunately, has not historically done [fly-to] destination marketing. It is just recently with Governor McKee that we have started to spend money on [fly-to] destination marketing. I have to say I am so proud of the governor, the senate president and our speaker that they recognize that and put funds in the state budget to basically introduce us, so people won’t confuse us with Long Island.

What are the prospects for T.F. Green getting regular international flights again?

Breeze would be doing international flights from here, and that is why they got A220s. That is a part of their plan. The [Airbus] A220 can fly from here and go to Europe. An airline cannot fly over a waterbody like the Atlantic without a long certification process, so they are going through that process right now.

Do we have other prospects for new international routes?

Yes, we do, and we’re talking to them. We would like to fly to places like the Dominican Republic, the Azores and Cabo Verde as we work with Breeze on Europe. We will continue to talk to these folks and make sure that we expand because when Norwegian was here, we had about eight or so international destinations. I think that the recipe needs to be perfect. Supply on its own doesn’t guarantee demand. I think we have to work on the demand side and destination marketing, even abroad. The more we do that, the more I think we will get traction. 

What is the airport’s most popular route?

Florida. West Palm Beach is just Rhode Island neighbors getting on that flight. Everybody knows everybody on the West Palm Beach flight. I told JetBlue, never take that flight out, because they will kill me.

It’s great that we’re getting Breeze, but we also lost Frontier Airlines this past April. There seems to be a lot of shuffling of airlines in and out the past few years. What does that say about the long-term health of the airport?

I think that it goes back to the load factors. Load factor is the percentage of seats taken on an aircraft. When I look at the load factors when [Frontier] made that decision, they were really weak. And that’s the thing. People look at the airport and go, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ The thing is, there is really nothing the airport can do in terms of load factors. We just bring the horse to water. And then we also make suggestions to others who can do something about the horse drinking, which is the destination marketing. That’s why we changed the name, which took three years to put ‘Rhode Island’ and ‘International’ in it. I think if we do marketing, if people knew where we were, if they knew what was here, I think that people would come and visit more, and then our load factors would be high. That would get us to where you are alluding to, which is sustainable business where Rhode Islanders have all these flights that remain.

Last year, we saw high levels of disruption as people swarmed back to airports. Are we expecting this year’s travel season to be similar?

Nobody expected some of the hiccups that showed up with airlines on either scheduling or pilot availability. Those are internal issues, and usually we find out about them at the same time you find out about them, through a newspaper. I don’t expect that to happen this summer, but you can never be sure.

Some areas are seeing a robust increase [in passenger numbers]; for example, Florida. But the Northeast has been sluggish to get back to 2019 numbers, especially New England. I think it may be because COVID was enforced differently here than some of the other places. We do see that this area — which includes Bradley and Logan and New Hampshire and other airports — has been behind. Boston is trying to catch up right now. It has been behind the other airports, for example, in Texas. The South has been doing really well.

The airport got a lot of buzz for its $10 million bathroom renovation in 2021. What other major goals or projects do you have coming up?

We are moving forward to transform this whole airport. We would like that first impression to be the best impression for anybody who comes to visit here or one of our businesses. We started with the restrooms, and we have plans to renovate this whole terminal. When you come to the airport in the next two or three years, it’s going to be totally transformed.

How did you end up here at Green? What’s the journey to becoming CEO of an airport corporation?

I started with the Houston airport system in the mid-nineties. I was there for about six years. At the end I was coordinating their $3 billion capital program, and from there I moved on to become the vice president of Nashville International in Nashville, Tennessee. From there, I became the director of aviation at Dayton Airport in Ohio for about four or five years. Then I took the job as the CEO in New Orleans, and I was there for about six-and-a-half years. And then I came here. I’ve been here for about six-and-a-half years. This is my fifth airport system. I had gone through this area on my way to Quebec and our family had really liked it. I was really impressed with how it looked, and I thought I had one more move before the kids would be too old to be relocating. And so, seven years ago, we came here. My kids went to school here; my younger one is in high school and my older one is going to URI. I have two sons. They love it here. They’re very Rhode Island. They are from here. They like the kind of food everybody else here likes. And I’m glad for them. You’ve got to belong somewhere, and I think Rhode Island’s a really good place that they can call home.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.