The future has the Airport Site Selection Committee and the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority in a dither.
Everyone involved needs to take a deep breath, calm down, and re-focus.
The argument over the potential economic impacts of sites that may be up to an hour away from lodging is producing howls up and down the valley.
Yet, unlike the painstaking detail the authority's consultants put into analysis of the physical and technical suitability of new sites, they applied a broad brush to the analysis of economic suitability.
In late February, the consultants gave the site selection committee its research. The research compared Friedman to a few other mountain resort airports. Comparisons included basics like distance from lodging, travel time between airport and lodging, travel time from lodging to takeoff, number of flights, kinds of planes, total number of seats, and total passengers.
It was a decent start, but it ended there when the consultants concluded, "It is not possible to definitively calculate the downside impact of an alternate airport site on passenger traffic."
That's true, but there are good ways to come up with better-than-nothing guesses.
What's missing are good econometric forecasts, or "what-if" scenarios. For example, what if a certain percentage of passengers decide it's easier and cheaper to fly to Boise? What factors—frequent direct flights by large jets, or infusions of money to subsidize seats on airlines—might offset the impact? What would subsidies cost based on experience in other resorts?
Or, what could bring a more distant airport closer—light rail, better highways, or high-occupancy vehicle lanes for shuttles? How likely are these services to materialize given the costs?
Businesses do this kind of future analysis all the time. Yet, in March, the authority and its consultants brushed aside pleas for better analysis.
The benefit of doing worst-case and best-case scenario forecasting is not that forecasts are perfect and totally reliable—far from it. The benefit lies in allowing the valley's business community and employees to make educated guesses on what lies ahead and to plan to mitigate impacts.
Good forecasting could raise the comfort level of valley businesses, and allow the valley to avoid expensive mistakes.
Consultants and the site selection committee took six months to evaluate the physical and technical characteristics of more than a dozen sites. A few months spent on in-depth economic analyses would be time well spent.
It's a far better way to approach a new airport than to treat it like a Las Vegas roulette wheel.
