Imagine the future in Asheville airport’s hard hat zone - Asheville's 828NewsNOW (2024)

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) —

Pardon the dust. Dodge the orange cones. Don’t slip on the loose gravel. Now climb a scaffolding staircase. Walk around the construction materials. Stand there. Look toward the mountains. And imagine.

One year from now, there will be anxious travelers sitting in this spot, watching the planes take off and land, getting ready for their own departures to who-knows-where from Asheville Regional Airport’s new north concourse.

For now, it’s an unfinished skeleton of steel girders holding up a cold concrete floor and a shady ceiling full of exposed pipes and dangling wires. A cool breeze makes it a dusty sanctuary on a warm June morning.

But there’s a bustle of construction work happening here, there and everywhere. And on Friday, June 7, the airport’s proud President and CEO Lew Bleiweis had a constant smile on his face as he led a gaggle of news reporters through the hard hat zone, talking about the astronomical growth in the passenger numbers and an airport expansion to meet the moment.

“This is more than double the space of the seven gates we had in the old, existing terminal,” Bleiweis said, huddling with reporters in the second-story space where the new gates are expected to open in the summer of 2025.

It doesn’t look like it yet, but the new concourse is planned to be “modern, spacious, bright with thoughtful design touches reflective of our area’s natural beauty,” the press packet says, describing “river-inspired flooring patterns and waterfall-influenced ceilings.” Walls of floor-to-ceiling windows will bring in natural light. And don’t forget the “living wall” in the new baggage claim area.

For now, quite frankly, it’s a bit of a mess, but that’s a necessary part of progress.

The original airport dates back to the early 1960s, showing steady growth in passenger numbers through the first decade of the new millennium. And then. Wow.

In 2018, Asheville Regional Airport hit the 1 million passenger mark for the first time. Planning began for this bond-funded $370 million construction project. Passenger numbers increased an astounding 43 percent in 2019, to 1.6 million. And then, after the short-term, nationwide slump in air travel during the global Covid-19 pandemic, demand simply exploded in 2022 and 2023.
Serving 2.25 million passengers in 2023, it’s now considered one of the fastest-growing airports in the country. Asheville and Western North Carolina have been discovered as a major travel destination.

Bleiweis says there’s no one thing that explains it. But he has seen the shift, saying that in his early days at the airport about half of the passengers were business travelers. Now, that proportion has shrunk, as non-business, leisure travel dominates three quarters of the traffic.

“The population of our community started growing. It started being recognized as a tourist destination and great place to live,” Bleiweis told reporters.

Along with nature and art-loving tourists, it also has drawn people (particularly from Florida) who keep second homes in Buncombe County, and that feeds a growing commuter-travel market.

And so, they’re making the airport bigger as fast as they can.

On Friday, contractors were busy preparing concrete in one area, working on girders in another, completing cinderblock walls on the runway side — all while commercial airliners were taking off and landing on the adjacent runways.

From the spot upstairs in the hard hat zone, reporters could look through the girders — where the windows soon will be — and see passengers queuing up for flight after flight. After flight. These days, about 35 to 40 flights per day take off and land at the airport, spokesperson Tina Kinsey says.

With that much activity around an antiquated airport, there are growing pains during the construction phase.

Unfamiliar detours, full parking lots and some confusion navigating the construction zone are par for the course these days, and airport officials are hoping travelers can be patient as the solution slowly takes shape.

As one reporter (ahem) whines about parking troubles Friday, Kinsey smiles and keeps repeating: “The growth is real… The growth is real.”