Provo Air Center was the busiest FBO in the world on Sunday, Jan. 2, according to flight support company Jeppesen Dataplan, which provides flight planning services to private and fractional aircraft worldwide.

Overall, PAC moved up from 10th to 6th busiest FBO for all their locations in 2010, but the FBO handled a whopping 113 private jets on a single day, jumping well ahead of the two usual hot spots in the Caribbean, St. Maarten and Nassau.

It was a new record and a big surprise to everyone, said General Manager Deborah Aharon. Some of the extra traffic was due to fuel shortages around the Caribbean, a possibility that PAC had anticipated.

“Every year some locations run out,” Aharon said, “and we saw an opportunity to position and promote Provo as the guaranteed fuel source.”

The company invested just under $1 million in a new fuel storage facility, finishing it just days before the holiday rush. It also studied historical figures around the Caribbean and consulted with its fuel partners and customers to accurately project how much extra fuel should be stored.

The extra effort paid off, as many locations ran low and aircraft had to be diverted to PAC for fuel, bringing extra revenue to the depleted government coffers through landing and other fees.

Aharon says that her staff and the customs and immigration officers assigned to the facility, as well as the air traffic controllers, did a superb job dealing with the extra loads. Their jobs were further complicated by bad weather in the U.S. and Europe, which delayed scheduled departures and eventually caused multiple flights to land in Provo at once.

“We would have a quiet 15 minutes, and then seven planes would all come down at once, and then a few minutes later another half dozen, and it was like that all week,” she said. “If we were that busy on the ground, can you imagine what it must have been like in the Control Tower with that many planes coming at you? We really have to applaud them.”

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by fp Staff
fp Turks & Caicos