--- In BATN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "4/28 SF Examiner" <batn@xxxx> wrote: Published Thursday, April 28, 2005, in the San Francisco Examiner "We are a leader among U.S. airports" 2005: Challenges & Opportunities By Josh Wein Recently named Airport Revenue News' Best Airport Director of 2004, John Martin has been shaping policy at San Francisco International Airport since 1981. This week, he spoke to Examiner reporter Josh Wein to discuss airline woes, the airport food-service industry and why bigger planes are better for SFO. EXAMINER: How do you measure and describe airport safety? Based on those standards, how does SFO rate against other major city -- airports? JOHN MARTIN: There's no one measure. There's many, many things you have to look at to evaluate how we're doing. The ultimate standard I use is that we are an industry leader among U.S. airports. We've been very much at the forefront of using new technology. Going back into the early '90s we were the first airport to have a system where employees access the airfield where they had to both slide their ID card through and have their hand scanned. Now, our international terminal is the first in the United States to have a full in-line baggage-screening system and we'll be adding that to our domestic terminals in May. Q: United has an enormous presence at SFO. Some have speculated that if that airline cannot work through its bankruptcy and stay intact, the impact on SFO and the Bay Area would be devastating. Has SFO management or your consultants run hypothetical projections assuming the loss of United as we know it today? A: We've got our own scenario planning to prepare for various worst-case scenarios in the industry. Ultimately, we are an origin- destination airport where people primarily begin and end their trips, versus a hub airport like Atlanta where the vast majority of passengers are transferring from one place to another. There's still going to be a demand and the airlines are going to meet that demand. The colors on the plane may change, but we're still going to have aircraft coming in. We do have about 25 percent of our passengers transferring flights, mostly to international flights and flights to Hawaii. Even in a worst case scenario with United, we think that there's still going to be that demand for transferring traffic. Q: SFO recently instituted a major restaurant and concessionaire improvement program. What results have you seen thus far? A: We're getting very positive feedback on the new food and beverage facilities we have. I think they really reflect the great restaurants we have in San Francisco. These are almost entirely restaurants you would find either in San Francisco or the Bay Area and they are serving exactly the same menus and same quality of products. Q: Who were the investors of the new food program? A: The restaurateurs have made a significant investment. We [SFO] have invested close to $20 million to improve the infrastructure and utility systems that serve the restaurants. We're also building out the food court, and the tenants are paying a rental rate that allows us to recover our costs related to construction. Then they're [restaurateurs] paying a percentage of gross concession. And we're projecting that next year will be about a 50 percent increase. I like to think this is the new standard for all world airports in terms of quality food and beverage. Q: You have been able to achieve more frequent landings and takeoffs without new runways. Can you explain how you were able to do that and what it means for growth at the airport? A: We've put in place a precision runway monitoring system that allows simultaneous landing on parallel runways. In the past, whenever we had good weather, we could handle 60 landings per hour, in bad weather we were down to 30 landings per hour. With this new system, we are able to get 42 to 43 landings per hour in certain bad weather conditions. We think we can continue to see capacity improvements by using this technology. We're very supportive of seeing other Bay Area airports take on commercial flights. Charles M. Shultz [in Santa Rosa] and Buchanan Field [in the East Bay] are options. Both have handled commercial flights before and we'd like to see them handle commercial flights again. Over time, as traffic gets worse on our freeways, and population grows in the North Bay and East Bay, the airlines are going to want to serve those cities with nonstop service to West Coast cities. That relieves the burden on us. Q: What is the status of adding a runway? A: It's on hold indefinitely. What needs to be done is smart growth. The growth we see at this airport needs to be with larger aircraft, and to primarily longer-haul international markets. In the month of January, we had passengers increase 12 percent and flights were down 4 percent. It's a remarkable statistic. It reflects that the airlines are using larger aircraft and they're getting more passengers on each plane. That's smart growth. We don't want to see a bunch of new regional aircraft or propeller jets serving SFO. We want to see 747, triple sevens. Larger aircraft. Q: How do airport managers feel about establishing high-speed rail for California? Do you support the high-speed rail initiative? A: The airport commission has come on record in support of high- speed rail. We think it would reduce the number of flights here, and we would see a 5 to 8 percent drop in passenger traffic if high-speed rail is introduced. The markets it would help us with -- markets like Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego -- are markets that are primarily served by smaller aircraft. So we might see an even bigger percentage reduction in the number of flights. At SFO, we would like to see a station right across the freeway from the international terminal and we would extend our AirTrain system to connect to the high-speed rail. Q: What is the significance of the Virgin American launch delay -- the low-cost airline that was to be headquartered here? Is it still going to happen? A: I still believe they will start service, probably in early 2006. They have continued to add managers to the staff, which I believe is a sign they are making progress. But they have not yet announced where the capital is going to come from to support the airline. We think they have a potential to have a very significant-sized operation here. Based on what they first said, we think San Francisco will likely be their biggest city in the system. "2005: Challenges & Opportunities" appears Fridays in The Examiner. --- End forwarded message ---