Business View-Oct 2023

234 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 10 1935, on Watertown Airways. Inland Airlines and successor Western Airlines served the airport from about 1938 until 1984; in the 1950s Pierre was one of six stops on a Minneapolis- Los Angeles Convair 240 flight. Over the years many regional carriers have flown a variety of aircraft, from small bush planes to North Central Airlines Douglas DC-3s which arrived in 1959, and since that day, jet service has been a constant. Today service to Denver is provided by Denver Air Connection, and they are in the process of expanding their offerings at the airport. “We took a step back during Covid, just like everyone else,” explains Brian Cowles, Airport Manager. “We are currently up to about 14,000 operations this year, so we are very busy. We have a modern terminal here, our previous terminal I think was built sometime in the late 40s, or early 50s, and it was just an old basic cinder block building that they had to periodically go through and make changes to. After 911 we decided to create a whole