Aviation View July 2023

30 AVIATION VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 “We handle about 2.3 million passengers annually which make us roughly the 92nd busiest airport in the nation and the seventh busiest airport in the northwest part of the United States,” says Brian Sprenger, Chief Executive Officer at the airport. “From an aircraft operations standpoint, we see about 115,000 annual operations.” Sprenger has seen much of the success himself, who got his first job at the airport 40 years ago cleaning airliner aircraft overnight. “I eventually got into the airline industry and worked in that industry for about almost 15 years before I switched over to the airport side. In the airline industry, I worked in such great places as Canada, Hawaii, and even the headquarters for Northwest Airlines in Minnesota. But I kept coming back to Montana and was able to come back to the airport authority here and jump to the airport side back in 1999. The previous airport director took me under his wing for a number of years. So, I’ve been at the airport authority for 24 years and Chief Executive Officer for the past 14.” From a commercial airline point of view, BZN has nonstop service to 22 destinations coast to coast and is served by Alaska, Allegiant, American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, Sun Country, and United. This amounts to some 20,000 flights per year. Which does not count some 18,000 business jet operations and then the general aviation traffic. With an airport of this size handling that amount of traffic you can imagine that there is always infrastructure that must be improved. Sprenger points out, however, that there has been consistent growth since the pandemic and that if you compare numbers pre 2020 their passengers have increased by 50 percent. BOZEMAN YELLOWSTONE INTERNAT IONAL A I RPORT