St. Paul’s downtown airport has a new restaurant, a new tenant, and some new outdoor benches where you can sit and watch the planes take off.

What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is anywhere close to as many planes to watch as it used to. Airport operations for Holman Field have plummeted to roughly a third of what they were a decade ago, according to numbers supplied by the Metropolitan Airports Commission.

Overall operation counts from all sources at the airport dipped from 118,000 in 2007 to 40,500 in 2017.

“Holman Field, I really don’t see them getting back to 100,000 again,” admitted Gary Schmidt, Director of Reliever Airports for the MAC.

Sure, all of the MAC’s airports have seen a decline. The entire industry has, analysts note.

But nowhere is the slope anywhere close to as drastic as those relating to St. Paul’s airfield. Minneapolis-St. Paul International went from 453,500 to 416,000 in the same time frame. Flying Cloud went from 118,000 to 91,000. The worst decline behind St. Paul was Crystal’s airport, where flights dipped from 54,000 to 34,000.

WHY THE DECLINE?

While nobody has a definitive answer as to why, analysts and MAC officials suggest several reasons.

First and foremost: St. Paul is the MAC’s main “corporate reliever” airport.

Where back in the 1980s it was predominately recreational flying and flight training — with corporate flights made up about 30 percent of operations — now between 80 and 90 percent of flights are corporate.

And corporate flights have drastically decreased over the past decade, MAC officials said.

Anecdotally, Schmidt pointed to when General Motors’ CEO flew to Washington in a corporate jet to talk bankruptcy in 2008 and faced immense criticism.

“I can tell you all the corporations started putting out memos about use of corporate flights,” Schmidt said.

WHAT WAS THE RECESSION’S IMPACT?

At the national level, however, while corporate flights did dip dramatically after the recession in the late 2000s, they have more than recovered since then, said Robert Mann, head of R.W. Mann & Co., an airline industry analyst based in Port Washington, N.Y.

“At the national level that (lasting decline) is just not the case. But you can see effects at the local level that don’t match,” Mann said. The national recovery is just an average across all airports, after all.

The Twin Cities’ two other busy airports — MSP and Flying Cloud in Eden Prairie — saw operation numbers increase last year after recent declines.

SO WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ST. PAUL?

It remains unclear why St. Paul wouldn’t recover as fast. The airport shows a steady slump in all non-military categories, including air taxis (chartered flights), itinerant general aviation (flights that either come from another, non-local airport or land in another non-local airport), and local civil flights (flights where the pilot both takes off and lands in the same airport).

Joseph Harris, Holman’s manager, pointed to investment in other MAC facilities and noted that the numbers at those facilities are largely driven by recreational users. There are now only 12 recreational hangers at Holman.

While the airport supports National Guard operations, their use had little to do with the decline. Military flights out of the airport constituted a small fraction of overall flights, and have gone up and down: There were about 7,500 military flights in 2007, roughly the same in 2016 — and a big dip to about 4,500 last year. But there were plenty of those big fluctuations over the interim, as opposed to the steady slide shown in civilian flights.

While some might point to a flight school, Twin Cities Aviation, leaving the airport several years ago, the numbers wouldn’t reflect that — as the school both came and went over the past decade.

A CHANGE IN THE CALCULATIONS

There is one factor affecting the numbers that has nothing to do with actual flights: Following a audit by the Federal Aviation Administration, some airports — including St. Paul — now have to calculate their flight counts a different way.

Prior to the audit, which took place several years ago, airports were able to count planes that flew in their airspace but didn’t land there — instances known as “overflights” — without even making contact with pilots via their control towers.

Now, according to the new FAA mandate, a plane must fly less than 3,000 feet above Holman field’s space and a control tower must make contact in order for the plane to be included in St. Paul’s operation numbers.

Data supplied to the Pioneer Press did not offer a level of detail that would determine how many planes had previously been included this way, but it should be noted there was a decline both before and in the years since the mandate was in effect.

INVESTMENTS CONTINUE AT AIRFIELD

Jim Pederson, station manager for Signature Flight Support — the biggest flight support business at Holman — seemed surprised by the numbers.

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Road restrictions on I-94 Wednesday as beams installed in Dale Street Bridge in St. Paul “We’re seeing a good business on the corporate side. We measure it by fuel flow,” said Pederson, who admitted he’d only been at Holman a couple years. “My take is with Holman, with the new restaurant, the occupancy of the hangars are really full.”

Holman’s Table, a new restaurant that opened right before the Super Bowl, expanded upon the space once taken by an old café at the airport’s historic terminal. With broad views of the runway, the restaurant is more upscale than the old diner and offers breakfast, lunch and dinner service. On the runway side of the same terminal, airport officials installed several all-weather benches for residents to sit and watch takeoffs and landings.

Best Jets International, a private jet charter and management service, relocated to Holman Field from Minneapolis-St. Paul International months ago and should complete its new hanger by April, airport officials noted.