Business View Magazine June 2023

205 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 6 PRYOR FI ELD REGIONAL AI RPORT county in Alabama for several years now. We are also only eight nautical miles from Huntsville International. We can see jets taking off from their runways. So, we complement each other in many ways. The Commercial side of the industry runs from Huntsman while we are the business and general aviation side.” All of this has happened at an incredible pace. It was only the end of 2019 when the previous FBO signed over operations for the Airport Authority to create their own FBO, Pryor Flight Center. “Since then, we have been working at having several weapons in our arsenal now to offer the best customer service possible. We have had a huge growth opportunity here and we have capitalized on it. We took the master plan and got down to the grassroots of it – and we are coming out the other side with a plan that will give us a strategy for development. We have recently allocated over 100 acres to developing long-term ground lease facilities. We recently signed one that is going to create a 170,000-square- foot facility and 250 new high-paying aviation-related jobs,” Fox highlights. Pryor Flight Center is what Fox calls a full-fledged red carpet Flight Center, able to handle very large aircraft as they are used to dealing with cargo operations for over 200 vendors through the airport. That means there are 737’s and DC 9’s which regularly fly out. There are also 141-based general aviation aircraft that call the airport home. Being a general aviation facility with the ability to handle larger aircraft and a large volume of traffic could be part of what makes Pryor Field so successful. It could also be the outward focus and the optimistic reach that has created a culture of development. Huntsville is home to an FBI, and a NASA facility as well, and so there is a lot of corporate traffic. “The future sort of kicked off last April,” says Fox. “That is when everything started moving forward as far as the overarching plan and it went from a tabletop discussion to a reality. And because aviation is a one hundred percent “build it and they will come” model, that is what we are choosing to do – open the doors and remove the red tape and work with the companies and tenants to make