Aaron Burkes will start work at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport on Nov. 1.
Burkes was named the airport’s new CEO and executive director in late September after the board of directors selected him over two other finalists. Burkes is currently president of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, a position he has held since he was appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson in 2015.
Burkes will replace XNA’s longtime CEO Scott Van Laningham, who announced his retirement after serving at the airport since its opening in 1998. Burkes said he knew he had “big shoes to fill” in replacing Van Laningham, who is looking forward to lots of travel and golf.
“I believe the airport has been run very well,” Burkes said. “It’s just going to be continuing to serve the customers well and grow the business. A lot of what I heard was the idea that the airport should be an economic driver for growth. We should make sure it’s never an impediment to that growth.”
Burkes brings a variety of skills to his new job. He has a law degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he served two years in the Arkansas General Assembly as a state representative from Rogers, he was executive dean of economic and workforce development at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he founded a real estate development company.
“The airport is an entire enterprise operation with a lot of different pieces to it,” Burkes said. “The CEO does need that wide variety of skill sets to sell, to understand the technical requirements, and it is also a business enterprise because it is a self-sustaining entity. That is really appealing to me because a lot of my background is in running a business.”
Blake Woolsey, the chairwoman of the XNA board of directors, said Burkes impressed the board with his financial acumen and his ambition.
“One of the major things was his ability to drive impact for the business overall, a proven impact,” Woolsey said. That includes “taking something over and looking at it and really figuring out where you need to lean in to in order to grow. As a board, we are very ambitious about where we want to go with XNA 2.0. There are a lot of things we would really like to make happen.”
Those things include completing an access road and expanding the airport’s terminal. Most important, though, is the airport improving its competitive airfare by attracting a low-cost airline.
It was something Van Laningham worked tirelessly on for years. A consultant has told XNA officials that the airport loses about 30 percent of travelers because fares are higher than the national average.
Van Laningham once said finding a low-cost airline willing to expand into XNA was the airport’s first, second and third priority. Burkes understands the importance, too.
About 70 percent of XNA’s passengers are business travelers, Burkes said, compared with the national average of 30 percent business travelers. That’s not surprising considering that northwest Arkansas is home to big companies like Walmart, J.B. Hunt and Tyson, as well as those companies’ satellite vendors. It’s also the result of casual travelers deciding it is worth driving to Tulsa or Little Rock or, twice in my case, Memphis to find a more affordable flight.
“It’s more than just going in and making a nice presentation,” Burkes said. “You sell them with the idea that this can be a profitable route, profitable airport. What the airport is doing right now is hugely skewed in favor of business travelers. Business travelers usually purchase their tickets not so far in advance [and are] more inelastic to price, meaning they will pay what they need to pay. Leisure travelers are much more responsive to price.”
The airport has had more than 1 million passengers, coming and going, annually since 2004 with a high of 1.4 million a year ago. Through September 2018, XNA has had 1.16 million passengers.
“That’s actually an exciting thing because I can come in on day one and start focusing on the bigger, more interesting, more impactful strategic decisions instead of just trying to plug the holes in a sinking ship,” Burkes said. “I’m sure there will be things I see where there will be opportunities, but it’s great to not be coming into something that is a mess.”
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