Aviation companies interested in becoming a part of the growing aerospace industry in North Carolina’s Greensboro area will welcome completion this summer of a taxiway-bridge providing access from Piedmont-Triad International Airport (PTI) to roughly 900 acres near the airport.
The project features prominently in a case study appearing in the 2017 North Carolina Economic Development Guide, published by Business North Carolina with the support of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina.
The article tells the tale of how state and local governments have partnered with corporations and PTI in a variety of ways to support the aviation hub’s growth and position it for the future. Most recently, those efforts have included a large state highway project that will soon complete a taxiway-bridge over a new segment of I-73. The taxiway-bridge, capable of handling a jumbo jet, will link hundreds of developable acres of PTI property on the opposite side of the interstate to PTI’s existing runways.
Download the the guide here.
“Our main function is to make sure that there’s a product for the economic developers to be able to sell,” PTI Executive Director Kevin Baker says in the article. “The products in this case are sites — 100 acres, 200 acres right next to a runway and next to an interstate. They don’t have any environmental problems and can be graded quickly — all the things a company is looking for when it’s looking to locate a new facility.”
PTI’s notable success in attracting major aviation tenants explains the need for the additional room. Over the past few decades, the article says, PTI has grown from 2,500 acres to 4,000 acres as it accommodated the arrival or expansions of big corporate players including Cessna, which opened an maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) facility for its Citation planes in the mid-1990s; FedEx’s $500 million mid-Atlantic hub; Honda Aircraft’s 680,000-square-foot research, design and manufacturing center, where it employs more than 1,700 people and manufactures the cutting-edge HondaJet; and HAECO Americas, which is building a massive fifth hanger, 250,000-square-feet of space that will enable the MRO to work on the largest planes that fly.
To read the full case study online, visit the Business North Carolina website.
You can also download the full guide here. The guide offers a number of case studies examining why companies decided to settle or grow in communities throughout North Carolina – as well as what local, regional, state and private industry economic development partners did to make it happen.