Growing Pains Signal Success at XNA

Years of construction work lay ahead for Northwest Arkansas National Airport. (Michael Woods)

Nothing says success like continued construction, right?

Anyone who has flown out of — or, like me, picked someone up at — Northwest Arkansas National Airport knows all about the ongoing construction at the airport, best known as XNA. The airport is redoing its terminal to accommodate the remarkable increase in business it has seen since it opened in 1998.

All the construction can lead to some headaches, of course. The lobby is blocked off so, access is gained mostly through one door by the baggage area.

The expansion and modernization — XNA’s words for the work — will be completed in 2026. The improvements are much needed, even at a price of $46 million.

“They built that terminal back when this airport was doing 200,000 or 300,000 enplanements,” XNA COO Andrew Branch said. “People would wait for passengers coming out of the checkpoint, and they were standing right on top of the escalator. There was no space.”

XNA surpassed 1 million in enplanements — passengers getting on a plane — in 2024 for the first time. The growing population of northwest Arkansas, predicted to reach close to 1 million by 2045, means the airport will be in expansion mode for quite a while.

“We will probably always be under construction too, for sure,” XNA CEO Aaron Burkes said. “We just kind of move from project to project.”

The terminal expansion project is one of three the airport is working on now. XNA is also building a $2.5 million communications center and a $15.5 million air traffic control tower.

During the next few years, the airport has a list of projects, including those three already under construction, that come with a price tag of nearly $400 million.

The projects include $65 million to repair the runway’s apron, $115 million to build a new concourse to open up more gates and $55 million for a consolidated rental auto center (ConRAC).

“There are $620 million in projects that have been identified as needed by 2040, with $400 million of those that are needed in the next five years,” Burkes said. “It is all related to the growth that we’re experiencing and that we’re forecasting.”

Many of the projects were shelved when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down air traffic for the most part in 2020. Burkes said the airport brain trust hasn’t added any new projects to its to-do list because XNA knew for years that projects such as terminal expansion, a ConRAC and new concourse were all important items.

The boom times of the post-COVID years just sped up the timeline.

“As we continue to grow, it pulls these other projects up in time,” Burkes said. “Some of these projects, if you had looked at them, you might have thought that they were 20 years out, and now they’re 10 years out, just because our growth has been faster than what was projected at that point in time.”