Halfway through Texas A&M's slate of home Southeastern Conference football games, traffic at the Easterwood Airport is starting to take off.
Airport Director John Happ said there's still not enough hard data to celebrate yet, but all signs point to more visitors, and tax dollars, to Brazos County as a result of the Aggies' move from the Big 12 to the SEC.
The airport is owned, but receives no funding from, Texas A&M University, Happ said. Two airlines, American and United, operate out of the airport.
Increased passenger volume would make the airport eligible for more federal grants to be reinvested in airport infrastructure, he said.
Happ had projected the volume of passengers would increase with the Aggies' move to the nation's premier football conference, but those hopes materialized in early September.
"Our busiest game in the Big 12, I think, was either OU or Texas. The Florida game [at A&M last month] increased [flights] by 20 percent compared to that game," Happ said.
Happ said the airport gets 75 to 100 flights during an average game and upwards of 125 or 150 during a busy game. The Florida game brought in about 170 flights, he said.
Happ said previously that airport directors near other SEC schools get as many as 250 flights per game.
And for the airport, which pulls in about 50 percent of its $6 million revenue from fuel sales, drawing visitors from farther away is, quite literally, paying off.
"We had a surprising amount of small planes from Florida," Happ said. "The farther they fly from the more fuel they burn."
Happ didn't have a dollar amount to attach to the increase in fueling, but estimated total revenue would increase about the same as the number of flights -- 20 percent.
The amount of parking and the number of rental cars, both smaller sources of revenue for the airport, are also up, Happ said.
Depending on what time of day the game is, Happ said, the visitors might stay overnight.
Shannon Overby, executive director of the Bryan-College Station Convention and Visitors Bureau, similarly said it's too early to tell for sure, but sales seem to be up thanks to the SEC move.
"For the Florida game, we saw a huge influx of visitors coming in not just Thursday or Friday, but Sunday night or Monday and they stayed the entire week," Overby said.
She said restaurants, liquor stores, hotels and retail stores all benefit from the out-of-town fans.
The Aggies are halfway done with their SEC home games this football season, with only home dates with LSU and Missouri remaining. Rain drenched the area for the Sept. 29 Arkansas game, and Happ said the turnout was down because of the weather.
The next SEC home game is Oct. 20 against LSU. Happ expects flight volume to continue to soar.
"The No. 1 issue is the weather," Happ said. "As long as the weather holds, I think we're going to see better than the home games we had with the Big 12."
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