MELBOURNE, Fla. – Fifteen years ago, when the housing market crashed and the Space Shuttle program was coming to an end, there were real concerns about the future of Melbourne.
Fast forward to today, and those concerns are long gone. The Melbourne Orlando International Airport has played a huge role in the area’s economic growth, but not in the traditional way.
When you walk onto the tarmac at the airport, what you’ll notice is not necessarily all the planes taking off, but rather all the businesses landing here.
“So the terminal itself has doubled in size, which is really nice, but most of the North end was not there (10 years ago),” said Greg Donovan, the airport’s executive director.
In fact, he says, over the past decade, the number of people who work at the Melbourne Orlando International Airport property on any given day has doubled to about $20,000 people.
“Certainly when the shuttle program started to wind down, there was an awful lot of apprehension of what’s next,” said Donovan. “Typically in the space program, it takes several years for new programs to generate. What’s really unique about the Melbourne area and this part of Central Florida is we have just a very unique workforce, generationally, going back all the way to the beginning of the NASA programs, all the way back to the beginning of space program.”
Today, more than 80% of the airport’s revenue comes from leasing land to aerospace companies that have landed here. Embraer manufactures six different business jets here, Northrop Grumman is designing the B-21, the next-generation stealth bomber, while STS performs maintenance on commercial airlines.
In all, the airport generated an estimated economic impact of $3.2 billion.
“People don’t want to leave. We love this area, right? So when that all took place, our leaders in this area, long before me, really reached out to the aerospace industry and said to the traditional aerospace industry, there are ways that we can tap into this labor pool,” said Donovan. “So we made a concentrated effort to make sure that we have the right infrastructure. What’s common in aerospace is you need runways, you need taxiways, and you need a labor force that’s educated. We put over $100 million worth of improvements. All three runways have been rebuilt. We’ve worked with the state of Florida and the federal government, the FAA, to bring in companies over here, and we’ve done really well competing against other states and other locations in the country.”
As for what’s coming next?
“Automated aircraft, E-V-T-O-L, it’s called Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft,” said Donovan. “These are smaller aircraft that can get into urban centers. So you think about South Florida, how much time it takes to drive from point A to point B, if you can eclipse that by an aircraft, and it’s an electric aircraft, very environmentally sensitive aircraft, that’s going to be the answer to the future and I think we’ll see production, I think we’ll see operation here.”
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