How can an FBO make itself a more attractive place to stop? For Stephens County Airport (KBKD), this includes leveraging its rural setting, nearby developments and businesses to its advantage. This allows the FBO to make infrastructure improvements and upgrade its customer service to draw in more traffic. Stephens County Judge Michael Roach spoke with Joe Petrie, editor-in-chief of Airport Business, during a recent edition of the AviationPros podcast about plans the rural airport has to improve its operations.

KBKD, located in Breckenridge, Texas, uses its proximity to hunting ranches, housing developments, flight schools, and a local avionics shop to draw in customers. It also uses its rural setting to draw in customers who might pay more to utilize a bigger airport in a metropolitan area.

"We had to look at that and say 'what can we do — what can we offer here that makes a big difference to pilots and those that visit our airport?'" Roach asked, mentioning KBKD is not as congested as other airports in metropolitan areas. "The county has really paid attention to that where we hope to benefit travelers who may pay more at a larger airport to incentivize them to stop here."

KBKD's initiatives to improve the airport started when the county purchased an entire fuel farm from a private company in 2020. The airport then branded it with a trusted name in aviation fuel — Phillips 66 — according to Roach. 

"We wanted quality fuel that pilots could trust. So it's not just an unnamed fuel tank with a self-serve in it but it has a quality reputation attached to it," he said, mentioning the FBO can offer fuel at a lower price than other airports in metropolitan areas.

According to Roach, the FBO is one of the closest airports to hunting ranches in the area and a housing development close to a nearby, popular lake. These factors are a driving force for the operation to build new hangars and a new FBO to draw in more customers. This traffic typically only flies in a certain points in the year, though, so the FBO must plan for this lull.

"Being that it will be used for a limited amount of time throughout the year, it also opens up quite a bit of space for transient traffic to park overnight and allows us to offer some additional services," Roach said.

The airport leverages its three separate runways to incentivize flight schools to use the facility.  

"We have our main runway 1735 — we have two crossway runways and that's very helpful for some of the smaller aircraft and on windy days you have a lot of options to land when there's that many approaches. We get a lot of traffic from flight schools because they know there's quite a few approaches and it gives them some options when they're training," he continued. 

The airport also leverages its proximity to a nationally recognized warbird restoration company to draw in visitors. 

"They've done some amazing projects and one thing that's cool about [the FBO] is you could be out at the self-serve pump filling your Cessna up and the airport field gets buzzed by a Mustang or Bearcat or an old B25 Bomber because you have these pieces of history that fly in and out of there on a regular basis," Roach said. He noted some of the avionics shop's visitors stop at KBKD which contributes to their opportunity to invest in capital projects in the future.  

Once the new FBO is built, the operation plans to leverage the old FBO building to bring in more revenue as well.  

"What we intend to do is once that FBO is built it will be one of the nicer FBOs in the area. And then our old FBO — we plan on working a business arrangement with some flight schools — some have already reached out to us. Our desire is to lease that out to somebody like a flight school that will make good use of our old FBO," he noted. 

Improving the facility itself is not the only step, though. The FBO wants to increase its level of customer service to be more attractive to potential visitors.

"A lot of counties own airports," Roach continued. "In particular there's not enough revenue generated to really staff that with a robust staff so one of the things we wanted to do by making these changes and increasing our traffic is also provide a level of service by staffing the airport. That was one of the metrics we looked at in remodeling is being able to increase the traffic, fuel sales, all the amenities that go with the airport enough to improve the service." 

Click the link to listen to the full podcast. AviationPros.com/21219064