At IND, airport prepared to fly solo

John J. Kish, the new executive director of Indianapolis International, said the airport retains its BAA brain trust in Indianapolis. As of last week, all the airport's 460 employees under BAA remained, except for Patrick Dooley. He resigned as airport director to become CEO of Indianapolis mechanical contracting firm Frank Irish Co. Taking over for Dooley is Robert Duncan, airport vice president and counsel who started at the airport in 1973.

We as a board took a position that no one would lose their job, said Lacy Johnson, president of the airport authority board and an attorney at Indianapolis law firm Ice Miller.

Pay and benefits for the most part remain comparable, airport leaders said.

The same people who were performing those tasks are still here, said Kish, who for the last several years has served as project director of the midfield terminal, to open next year.

Johnson credited BAA for systems and processes it brought to Indianapolis, but he noted the vast majority of the employees were from here, not from the United Kingdom. The gray matter was here before.

A trailblazer in innovative airport operation, BAA shook up American airports, starting in Pittsburgh in the early 1990s. BAA turned Pittsburgh's airport into a virtual shopping mall. Today, however, the airport industry has caught up with BAA, Kish said.

Armbrust said airport retailing is anything but mature, however. Rather, she calls it a quickly evolving science ranging from how best to negotiate deals with tenants to concepts such as adjacency, which involves coming up with the ideal pairing of stores in a given location to maximize sales.

Fewer complications?

Kish noted that most airports in the country are still municipally operated and that his team will continue to stay abreast of the latest strategy in retailing through trade groups, seminars and other continuing education.

A typically unflappable tactician, Kish said the transition to municipal management this month was like Y2K. It came and it went and nothing happened.

If anything, Kish sees advantages to returning to municipal management. Besides saving an average of $ 1.75 million a year by not having to pay BAA management fees, municipal management removes the need for BAA oversight by the airport authority.

We don't compete for board attention. We don't compete for board resources.

Perhaps most important, Kish said, is that putting the authority back in control of airport operations should improve communication with the authority's construction team on midfield. Integrating operations and midfield teams is crucial as the airport prepares to transition to the new terminal, he said.

It's kind of the best of all worlds for us, said Mike Wells, a longtime airport authority board member who quarterbacked former Mayor Steve Goldsmith's privatization of airport management in 1995.